Nonbinary type-II hybrid ARQ in Rician fading channels

Type-II hybrid ARQ (HARQ) is extended to the nonbinary case, where a shortened half-rate RS code is used in the FEC subsystem instead of a binary BCH code. The RS code is a powerful burst-error-correction code and has the biggest minimum distance among all the codes with the same code length, thereby providing more flexible adaptation. The throughput, reliability, and delay of nonbinary type-II HARQ with M-ary PSK (MPSK) over Rician fading channels are analyzed. Binary HARQ is analyzed also for comparison. The analytical results show that nonbinary HARQ outperforms its binary counterpart with respect to throughput, reliability, and average delay, when the modulation scheme, and the error-detection and error-correction codes are selected properly.