In this embodiment of the present invention, the first device and the second device interact with each other. Specifically, optionally, the second device sends data to the first device, and the data is carried by the P data transmission units. After receiving the data, the first device needs to check the data, to determine whether the data carried by the P data transmission units is correctly received.
If the first device correctly receives data carried by a specific data transmission unit, the first device needs to feed back, to the second device, feedback information used to indicate that the data is correctly received, so that the second device deletes, from a cache, the data carried by the data transmission unit. If the first device incorrectly receives data carried by a specific data transmission unit, the first device needs to feed back, to the second device, feedback information used to indicate that the data is incorrectly received, so that the second device retransmits the data carried by the corresponding data transmission unit.
Optionally, the feedback information may be ACK/NACK feedback information for downlink data in an LTE system, and the ACK/NACK feedback information in the LTE is for a transmission block (transmission block, TB), in other words, is a TB-level ACK/NACK feedback. The TB is a data transmission unit.
When the TB is greater than 6144 bits, the TB needs to be split into a plurality of code blocks (code block, CB). In future 5G to obtain a higher throughput, the TB may be very large, and needs to be split into tens or even hundreds of CBs for coding. In this case, a simple TB-level ACK/NACK has relatively low efficiency, and a transmission error of one CB may cause retransmission of the entire TB.