Outer Code-Based HARQ Retransmission for Multicast/Broadcast Services in 5G

This paper studies a hybrid automatic repeat and request (HARQ) mechanism for multicast/broadcast services in 5G New Radio (NR) systems. HARQ is widely used in unicast transmission to improve reliability and resource efficiency under the fading channel. However, for multicast/broadcast, it is difficult to apply conventional HARQ technology because the probability of retransmission becomes high as the number of receiver increases. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient retransmission scheme, called outer code- based HARQ. After the initial transmission of a given data packet for multicast/broadcast, each receiver sends feedback information on how many code blocks (CBs) are broken instead of which CBs are broken. Then, for retransmission of the data, the transmitter generates parity CBs by using outer code such as Reed- Solomon (RS) or Raptor code and transmits the parity CBs after applying inner code such as low density parity check (LDPC) code. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional HARQ schemes, reducing more than 50% of retransmissions.