A II-HARQ scheme for BEC models with ML decoding of Turbo Codes

In this paper we propose a coding-decoding scheme to be used for II-type hybrid ARQ on a binary erasure channel model, based on rate compatible punctured binary Turbo Codes, DRP interleaver design and ML decoding at the receiver. We carefully design the interleaver and the puncturing mask, and we describe how to achieve low-complexity Maximum Likelihood decoding. We show for the case of an MPEG2 packet size that this scheme overrides random codes upper bounds, providing throughputs within 0.05 bits from capacity at word error rates greater or equal to 1e-6.