ing FEC through correction of the error patterns that occur more frequently; however, when the less frequent error patterns are detected, the receiver requests a retransmission where each retransmission carries the same or some redundant information to help the packet detection. The HARQ uses FEC to correct a subset of errors at the receiver and rely on error detection to detect the remaining errors. Most practical HARQ schemes utilize CRC codes for error detection and some form of FEC for correcting the transmission errors. The HARQ schemes are typically classified into two groups depending on the content of subsequent retransmis- sions, as follows [15]: HARQ with chase combining: In this HARQ scheme, the same data packet is transmitted in all retransmissions. Soft combining may be used to improve the reliability. The blocks of data along with the CRC code are encoded using FEC encoder before transmission. If the receiver is unable to correctly decode the data block, a retransmission is requested. When a retransmitted coded block is received, it is combined with the previously received block corresponding to the same information bits (using for example maximum ratio com- bining method) and fed to the decoder. Since each retransmission is an identical replica of the original transmission, the received Eb/No, that is, the energy per information bit divided by the noise spectral power density, increases per each retransmission, improving the likelihood of correct decoding. In chase combining HARQ, the redundancy version of the encoded bits is not changed from one transmission to the next; therefore, the punctur- ing pattern remains the same. The receiver uses the current and all previous HARQ trans- missions of the code block in order to decode the information bits. The process continues until either the information bits are correctly decoded and pass the CRC test or the maxi- mum number of HARQ retransmissions is reached. When the maximum number of retransmissions is reached, the MAC sublayer resets the process an