Power Allocation for Finite-Blocklength IR-HARQ

This letter concerns the power allocation across the multiple transmission rounds under the Incremental Redundancy Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (IR-HARQ) policy, in pursuit of an energy-efficient way of fulfilling the outage probability target in the finite-blocklength regime. We start by showing that the optimization objective and the constraints of the above power allocation problem all depend upon the outage probability. The main challenge then lies in the fact that the outage probability cannot be written analytically in terms of the power variables. To sidestep this difficulty, we propose a novel upper bound on the outage probability in the finite-blocklength regime, which is much tighter than the existing ones from the literature. Most importantly, by using this upper bound to approximate the outage probability, we can recast the original intractable power allocation problem into a geometric programming (GP) form—which can be efficiently solved by the standard method.