Performance of hybrid-ARQ with incremental redundancy over relay channels

In this paper, we consider a relay network consisting of a source, a relay, and a destination. The source transmits a message to the destination using hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) with incremental redundancy (IR). The relay overhears the transmitted messages over the different HARQ rounds and tries to decode the data packet. In case of successful decoding at the relay, both the relay and the source cooperate to transmit the message to the destination. A maximum number M of HARQ rounds is considered. The channel realizations are independent for different HARQ rounds. We assume Rayleigh fading channels for the links source-relay, source-destination, and relay-destination. We investigate the performance of HARQ-IR over relay channel from an information theoretic perspective. Analytical expressions are derived for the information outage probability, the average number of transmissions, and the average transmission rate. We illustrate through our investigation the benefit of relaying. We also show the impact of the target outage probability ϵ and the maximum number M of HARQ rounds on the outage probability, the average number of transmissions, and the average transmission rate.