An incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat- request （IR-HARQ）scheme based on irregular repeat-accumulate （IRA）codes is proposed. The design of rate compatible punctured IRA codes suitable for an IR-HARQ scheme is well formulated and efficiently solved by a linear-programming method, along with a one-dimensional approach for density evolution. Compared to IR-HARQ schemes based on turbo codes, simulation shows that the proposed IR-HARQ schemes based on IRA codes may achieve almost the same performance at a block size of 1 024, but better throughput at a block size of 4 096. The advantages of the proposed scheme in implementation, including decoding complexity and parallelism, make it more attractive in practice than the IR-HARQ schemes based on both turbo and LDPC codes.
