Hybrid Coding Gain and Hybrid ARQ Based on Conception of Majority Voting

Abstract. Based on the conception of majority voting, a hybrid ARQ scheme for binary linear block codes over AWGN channel is presented. At each transmission, the received word is kept in memory buffers if errors are detected. If there are still errors after a number of transmissions, the re-transmission stops to improve the throughput efficiency. From the received words, the decoding process of proposed hybrid ARQ first determines each bit as 1 or 0 based on the majority of the corresponding bits in the received words. The word resulting from voting is then decoded by algebraic decoder as the output code word. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid ARQ scheme outperforms ARQ scheme in both error-correcting performance and throughput efficiency, particularly under low SNR. Additionally, a criterion in terms of throughput and coding gain is proposed for overall evaluation of hybrid ARQ schemes compared to that of ARQ scheme. Comparisons between plurality-based hybrid ARQ and majority-based hybrid ARQ are also made on the basis of proposed hybrid coding gain.