Soft combining for hybrid ARQ

A soft combining approach utilising symbol-by-symbol maximum a posteriori probability decoding is proposed for hybrid automatic repeat request schemes. In comparison to an existing soft combining approach, significant reductions in post-decoding bit error rate can be obtained without sacrificing the throughput efficiency. This is achieved with the proposed method by accumulating the signal-to-noise ratio at the channel output on each additional retransmission, for use in calculating extrinsic log-likelihood ratios on subsequent decoding attempts.