Rate Adaptation for Cooperative HARQ

We analyze the average throughput and the outage probability for relay-based incremental redundancy HARQ transmission over block fading channel. We focus on the effects of having an error-free multi-bit feedback channel instead of the single-bit ACK/NACK feedback used in conventional HARQ. This multi-bit feedback message provides the cooperating nodes with outdated channel state information (CSI) so that they can adapt their transmission rate. We discuss a network with M relay nodes and assume adaptive transmission rate for all the cooperating nodes. We describe the adaptation problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and employ the Dynamic Programming (DP) for optimization. The numerical results obtained in the case of one relay transmission, indicate that significant throughput gains can be obtained when compared to non-adaptive, i.e, fixed-rate HARQ. Moreover, we study the performance limits of the system model by finding an upper bound of the throughput for the cooperative HARQ channel which is applicable to both adaptive and non-adaptive models. Finally, we analyze the discretization issues and conclude that only a small number of feedback bits is required by the adaptive system to outperform the conventional single-bit HARQ.