Performance of a Partial Retransmissions Hybrid ARQ Scheme in Rayleigh Block Fading Channels

We propose a partial retransmission (PR) scheme to be used in block fading channels. The proposed method sends only a fraction of the original transmitted codeword at each retransmission, and makes use of an appropriate power allocation and of symbol by symbol combining at the receiver. The performance is investigated by means of the outage probability and the throughput. The proposed PR scheme is shown to outperform both the incremental redundancy (IR) and Chase combining (CC) HARQ methods, for some signal to noise ratio values and for the scenarios considered in this paper.