A New Error Control Scheme for Hybrid ARQ Systems

This paper introduces the concept of a generalized hybrid ARQ (GH-ARQ) scheme for adaptive error control in digital communication systems. This technique utilizes the redundant information available upon successive retransmissions in an efficient manner so as to provide high throughput during poor channel conditions. A new class of linear codes is proposed for the GH-ARQ system application. The main feature of this class of codes is that the encoder/decoder configuration does not change as the length of the code is varied. As a result, the receiver uses the same decoder for decoding the received information after every retransmission while the error correcting capability of the code increases, thereby leading to an improved performance and minimum complexity for the overall system implementation.