A method and system to increase the throughput of a HARQ protocol in a wireless network. When a station receives a downlink HARQ sub-burst that has an incorrect cyclic redundancy check, it determines if there is an overflow event of its buffer. If so, the station reduces the size of the HARQ sub-burst to be stored in the buffer and stores the resized HARQ sub-burst in the buffer. When the station transmits an uplink HARQ sub-burst, the station can reduce the size of the transmitted HARQ sub-burst if it exceeds the size of the buffer. The amount of buffer required in the station can also be reduced by representing each log likelihood ratio (LLR) value of each of one or more bits of each symbol of a HARQ burst with a number of quantization bits based on a metric sensitivity to noise of each bit of each symbol.