Combining Data Aggregation and HARQ Schemes to Guarantee Quality-of-Services in Uplink Relay-Based Networks

Data aggregation significantly reduces signaling overhead and delay by encapsulating multiple packets in queue into an aggregated packet in uplink two-hop relaying networks. In addition, hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) operation increases the system throughput by retransmitting the entire or part of the packet transmitted at the initial transmission. We combine data aggregation and HARQ schemes in uplink multi-hop relaying. We discuss a problem about how to combine data aggregation and HARQ at an uplink relay station(RS). We propose two data aggregation schemes : a fine classification mode (FCM) and a coarse classification mode (CCM), in which packets in queue are aggregated based on their quality of service(QoS) with different criteria. We compare the throughput performance of the conventional scheme and our two proposed schemes in case of a fixed RS and a moving RS. The CCM scheme is more efficient in the fixed RS, while the FCM scheme is more efficient in the moving RS.