RWTH Aachen
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Institute for Communication
Systems and Data Processing
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On the Design of Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request Schemes with Unreliable Feedback

Authors:
Tobias Breddermann, Benedikt Eschbach, and Peter Vary
Journal:
IEEE Transactions on Communications
Volume:
62
Number:
2
Date:
Feb. 2014
Pages:
758–768
ISSN:
0090-6778
URL:
10.1109/TCOMM.2013.122913.130363
Language:
English

Abstract

HARQ schemes are employed in mobile communication systems to reduce the residual Frame Error Rate (FER) after channel decoding. If decoding fails, the receiver requests the transmission of additional redundancy about these frames to improve the decoding success. Signaling is carried out over a feedback link from the receiver back to the transmitter. However, errors on the feedback link severely influence the behavior of the HARQ system and may degrade the overall system performance. In this contribution, the impact of HARQ signaling errors on the FER, the average number of HARQ transmissions per frame, and the system throughput is investigated. We derive analytical expressions for all performance measures based on FER simulations of the HARQ system with reliable feedback. The theoretical results are verified by the example of the LTE physical layer, however, they are also applicable to other communication systems. Moreover, target requirements for the maximum tolerable feedback error probabilities are derived which are used to develop design guidelines for HARQ feedback transceivers.