Hybrid ARQ with Cross-Packet Channel Coding

We describe hybrid automatic repeat request/forward error correction (H-ARQ) with cross-packet channel coding which extends current H-ARQ schemes for point-to-point communications. In contrast to current H-ARQ schemes, the transmission of two consecutive packets of information bits is considered jointly. If a retransmission for the first packet is necessary, we encode the first and a second packet jointly. For fading channels, this allows diversity gain from retransmissions without decreasing the total code rate. We describe an encoder and a decoder which can be decoded iteratively for a system with H-ARQ with cross-packet channel coding