ARQ with Adaptive Feedback for Energy Harvesting Receivers

Abstract: Automatic repeat request (ARQ) is widely used in modern communication systems to improve transmission reliability. In conventional ARQ protocols developed for systems with energy-unconstrained receivers, an acknowledgement/negative-acknowledgement (ACK/NACK) message is fed back when decoding succeeds/fails. Such kind of non-adaptive feedback consumes significant amount of energy, and thus will limit the performance of systems with energy harvesting (EH) receivers. In order to overcome this limitation and to utilize the harvested energy more efficiently, we propose a novel ARQ protocol for EH receivers, where the ACK feedback can be adapted based upon the receiver's EH state. Two conventional ARQ protocols are also considered. By adopting the packet drop probability (PDP) as the performance metric, we formulate the throughput constrained PDP minimization problem for a communication link with a non-EH transmitter and an EH receiver. Optimal reception policies including the sampling, decoding and feedback strategies, are developed for different ARQ protocols. Simulation results will show that the proposed ARQ protocol not only outperforms the conventional ARQs in terms of PDP, but can also achieve a higher throughput.