Performance of Reed-Solomon codes for hybrid-ARQ over Rayleigh fading channels under imperfect interleaving

We present a new method to analyze the performance of Reed-Solomon codes for hybrid automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) over Rayleigh fading channels with imperfect interleaving. Using the asymptotic results of level crossings of the faded envelope, we characterize the packet-error probability as a function of the Doppler frequency and mean signal-to-noise ratio. We then use the notion of equivalent Doppler frequency to include the effect of imperfect interleaving on performance. This approach allows us to directly evaluate the throughput of hybrid-ARQ schemes and also specify minimum interleaving depths for achieving optimum throughput on correlated Rayleigh channels.