A reliability output Viterbi algorithm with applications to hybrid ARQ

We present an algorithm that permits a receiver to calculate the probability of packet error in parallel with the Viterbi decoding process. This packet reliability value may be used to request retransmissions in a type-I hybrid ARQ scheme. It is shown that this scheme can be used to guarantee any required bound on the packet error probability. In addition, this scheme can be used in conjunction with packet combining. The performance of this scheme is compared with that of the Yamamoto-Itoh algorithm and is shown to provide a significant improvement in throughput.