This article investigates the performance of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) with code combining over the ideally interleaved Nakagami-m fading channel. Two retransmission protocols with coherent equal gain code combining are adopted, where the entire frame and several selected portions of the frame are repeated in protocols I and II, respectively. Protocol II could be viewed as a generalization of the recently proposed reliability-based HARQ. To facilitate performance analysis, an approximation of the product of two independent Nakagami-m distributed random variables is first developed. Then the approximate analysis is utilized to obtain exact frame error probability (FEP) for protocol I, and the upper bound of the FEP for protocol II. Furthermore, the throughput performance of both two protocols is presented. Simulation results show the reliability of the theoretical analysis, where protocol II outperforms protocol I in the throughput performance due to the reduced amount of transmitted information.
