A Systematic Approach to Incremental Redundancy With Application to Erasure Channels

This paper focuses on the design and evaluation of pragmatic schemes for delay-sensitive communication. Specifically, this contribution studies the operation of data links that employ incremental redundancy as a means to shield information bits from the degradation associated with unreliable channels. While this inquiry puts forth a general methodology, exposition centers around erasure channels because they are well suited for analysis. Nevertheless, the goal is to identify both structural properties and design guidelines that are broadly applicable. Conceptually, this paper leverages a methodology, termed sequential differential optimization, aimed at identifying near-optimal block sizes for hybrid ARQ. This technique is applied to erasure channels and it is extended to scenarios where throughput is maximized subject to a constraint on the feedback rate. The analysis shows that the impact of the coding strategy adopted and the propensity of the channel to erase symbols naturally decouple when maximizing throughput. Ultimately, block size selection is informed by approximate distributions on the probability of decoding success at every stage of the incremental transmission process. This novel perspective, which rigorously bridges hybrid automatic repeat request and coding, offers a computationally efficient framework to select code rates and blocklengths for incremental redundancy. These findings are supported through numerical results.