Application of Reed-Solomon codes with erasure decoding to type-II hybrid ARQ transmission

Hybrid ARQ protocols are capable of improving the robustness and throughput of a mobile wireless communication system when a feedback channel is available. In this paper a type-II hybrid ARQ protocol is implemented with a punctured Reed-Solomon (RS) code to result in a rate-compatible system. It is proposed to use side-information provided by pilot symbols to flag symbol erasures, and perform erasure decoding of rate-compatible RS codes. Throughput simulation results show that when using errors-only decoding, rate-compatible punctured RS codes outperform their constituent punctured RS codes. When comparing errors-only decoding to erasure decoding of the rate-compatible RS codes, a power savings is observed when erasure decoding is employed. The specific gain achieved however, is dependant on the average signal-to-noise ratio and constituent set of punctured RS codes.