Abstract-We consider the effective capacity performance measure of persistent-and truncated-retransmission schemes that can involve any combination of multiple transmissions per packet, multiple communication modes, or multiple packet communication. We present a structured unified analytical approach, based on a random walk model and recurrence relation formulation, and give exact effective capacity expressions for persistent hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) and for truncated-retransmission schemes. For the latter, effective capacity expressions are given for systems with finite (infinite) time horizon on an algebraic (spectral radius-based) form of a special block companion matrix. In contrast to prior HARQ models, assuming infinite time horizon, the proposed method does not involve a non-trivial per case modeling step. We give effective capacity expressions for several important cases that have not been addressed before, e.g. persistent-HARQ, truncated-HARQ, network-coded ARQ (NC-ARQ), two-mode-ARQ, and multilayer-ARQ. We propose an alternative QoSparameter (instead of the commonly used moment generating function parameter) that represents explicitly the target delay and the delay violation probability. This also enables closedform expressions for many of the studied systems. Moreover, we use the recently proposed matrix-exponential distributed (MED) modeling of wireless fading channels to provide the basis for numerous new effective capacity results for HARQ.