Hybrid ARQ: Theory, State of the Art and Future Directions

Hybrid ARQ transmission schemes combine the conventional ARQ with forward error correction. Incremental redundancy hybrid ARQ schemes adapt their error correcting code redundancy to varying channel gains, and thus achieve better throughput performance than ordinary ARQ, particularly over wireless channels with fluctuating channel conditions. Consequently, the scheme has been adopted by a number of standards for mobile phone networks. We provide a brief survey of theory and state of the art of hybrid ARQ, and present some possible future directions keeping in mind practical considerations.