Relay Switching Aided Turbo Coded Hybrid-ARQ for Correlated Fading Channel

Hybrid-Automatic-Repeat-reQuest (HARQ) has become an indispensable technique in reliable communications systems. However, its performance is inevitably affected by the channel’s fading correlation. In this paper, we proposed a novel relay-switching aided HARQ scheme in order to mitigate the detrimental effects of correlated fading without unduly increasing the system’s complexity and delay. Our results show that the proposed relay-switching regime operates efficiently in correlated channels, hence significantly reduces the error floor of turbo-coded HARQ. Additionally, a HARQ scheme using Segment Selective Repeat (SSR) is incorporated in the relay-switching scheme for achieving further improvements. Quantitatively, the proposed relay-switching aided turbo-coded HARQ scheme using SSR may achieve an approximately 2 dB gain, compared to the conventional amplify-and-forward aided turbo coded HARQ arrangement using Chase Combining. Index Terms - Relay switching, correlated fading channel, Hybrid-ARQ, turbo codes, chase combining, incremental redundancy, selective segment repeat

Coding with Scrambling, Concatenation, and HARQ for the AWGN Wire-Tap Channel: A Security Gap Analysis

This study examines the use of nonsystematic channel codes to obtain secure transmissions over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) wire-tap channel. Unlike the previous approaches, we propose to implement nonsystematic coded transmission by scrambling the information bits, and characterize the bit error rate of scrambled transmissions through theoretical arguments and numerical simulations. We have focused on some examples of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to estimate the security gap, which we have used as a measure of physical layer security, in addition to the bit error rate. Based on a number of numerical examples, we found that such a transmission technique can outperform alternative solutions. In fact, when an eavesdropper (Eve) has a worse channel than the authorized user (Bob), the security gap required to reach a given level of security is very small. The amount of degradation of Eve's channel with respect to Bob's that is needed to achieve sufficient security can be further reduced by implementing scrambling and descrambling operations on blocks of frames, rather than on single frames. While Eve's channel has a quality equal to or better than that of Bob's channel, we have shown that the use of a hybrid automatic repeat-request (HARQ) protocol with authentication still allows achieving a sufficient level of security. Finally, the secrecy performance of some practical schemes has also been measured in terms of the equivocation rate about the message at the eavesdropper and compared with that of ideal codes.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figure

Using Channel Output Feedback to Increase Throughput in Hybrid-ARQ

Hybrid-ARQ protocols have become common in many packet transmission systems due to their incorporation in various standards. Hybrid-ARQ combines the normal automatic repeat request (ARQ) method with error correction codes to increase reliability and throughput. In this paper, we look at improving upon this performance using feedback information from the receiver, in particular, using a powerful forward error correction (FEC) code in conjunction with a proposed linear feedback code for the Rayleigh block fading channels. The new hybrid-ARQ scheme is initially developed for full received packet feedback in a point-to-point link. It is then extended to various different multiple-antenna scenarios (MISO/MIMO) with varying amounts of packet feedback information. Simulations illustrate gains in throughput.Comment: 30 page

Reconfigurable rateless codes

We propose novel reconfigurable rateless codes, that are capable of not only varying the block length but also adaptively modify their encoding strategy by incrementally adjusting their degree distribution according to the prevalent channel conditions without the availability of the channel state information at the transmitter. In particular, we characterize a reconfigurable ratelesscode designed for the transmission of 9,500 information bits that achieves a performance, which is approximately 1 dB away from the discrete-input continuous-output memoryless channel’s (DCMC) capacity over a diverse range of channel signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios