On the finite blocklength performance of HARQ in modern wireless systems

Future wireless communications will face the dual challenge of supporting large traffic volume while providing reliable service for various kinds of delay-sensitive traffic. In the light of this challenge, this paper investigates the throughput performance of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) systems under finite blocklength constraint. We present a framework to compute the maximum achievable rate with HARQ over the Rayleigh fading channel for a given probability of error. In the proposed framework, the operation of HARQ over the Rayleigh fading channel is modeled as a finite-state Markov chain. The state transition probabilities of the proposed Markov model are estimated from the fading characteristics of the wireless channel as well as the dispersion associated with different channel state sequence realizations. With this framework we are able to link the HARQ throughput performance to the characteristics of the underlying physical channel as well as the system design parameters such as modulation and transmit power. Furthermore, we discuss the relationship between the system throughput, and the number of HARQ rounds. The results show that the required number of HARQ rounds to take full advantage of HARQ depends on the choice of modulation, and varies as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).