Cooperative hybrid-automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols, which can exploit the spatial and temporal diversities, have been widely studied. The efficiency of cooperative HARQ protocols is higher than that of cooperative protocols because retransmissions are only performed when necessary. We classify cooperative HARQ protocols as three decode-and-forward-based HARQ (DF-HARQ) protocols and two amplified-and-forward-based HARQ (AF-HARQ) protocols. To compare these protocols and obtain the optimum parameters, two unified frameworks are developed for protocol analysis. Using the frameworks, we can evaluate and compare the maximum throughput and outage probabilities according to the SNR, the relay location, and the delay constraint. From the analysis we can see that the maximum achievable throughput of the DF-HARQ protocols can be much greater than that of the AF-HARQ protocols due to the incremental redundancy transmission at the relay.