Performance Evaluation of HARQ Schemes for the Internet of Things

Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) techniques are widely employed in the most important wireless systems, e.g., the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular standard, to increase the reliability of the communication. Despite these schemes have been widely studied in literature in the past several years, the recent results obtained by Polyanskiy, Poor, and Verdu on the finite-blocklength regime disclosed new possibilities for the research on HARQ schemes. Indeed, new communications trends, which are usually part of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, are characterized by very short packet sizes and a high reliability requirement and, therefore, they call for efficient HARQ techniques. In many scenarios, the energy efficiency of the communication plays a key role as well. In this paper, we aim at providing a comprehensive performance comparison of various kinds of HARQ schemes in the context of short-packet transmissions with energy constraints. We derive optimal power allocation strategies and we show that a minimum 50% energy saving can be achieved after very few transmission attempts if we enable packet combining at the receiver side.