A channel representation method for the study of hybrid retransmission-based error control

In this paper, we present a methodology to obtain a channel description tailored on performance evaluation for incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request schemes. Such techniques counteract channel errors by using data coding and transmitting parts of the codeword over different channel realizations. We focus on coding performance models where the error probability is asymptotically zero if the channel parameters of these realizations fall within a given region. To map this region in a compact but still precise manner, we adopt a finite-state channel model. This approach is quite common in the literature; however, differently from existing work, we propose a novel method to derive efficient channel partitioning rules, i.e., a code-matched quantization of the channel state. Such a representation enables the use of accurate Markov models to study the system performance. Compared to existing channel representation methods, our proposed technique leads to a more accurate evaluation of higher layer statistics while at the same time keeping the computational complexity low.