  We study short-packet communications, subject to latency and reliability
constraints, under the premises of limited frequency diversity and no time
diversity. The question addressed is whether, and when, hybrid automatic repeat
request (HARQ) outperforms fixed-blocklength schemes with no feedback (FBL-NF)
in such a setting. We derive an achievability bound for HARQ, under the
assumption of a limited number of transmissions. The bound relies on
pilot-assisted transmission to estimate the fading channel and scaled
nearest-neighbor decoding at the receiver. We compare our achievability bound
for HARQ to stateof-the-art achievability bounds for FBL-NF communications and
show that for a given latency, reliability, number of information bits, and
number of diversity branches, HARQ may significantly outperform FBL-NF. For
example, for an average latency of 1 ms, a target error probability of 10^-3,
30 information bits, and 3 diversity branches, the gain in energy per bit is
about 4 dB.
