Android :: Retrying Http Connection

I'm making an http request. I'm on a platform (android) where network operations often fail because the network connection might not be immediately available. Therefore I'd like to try the same connection N times before completely failing. Was thinking of something like this:

DefaultHttpClient mHttp = ...;
public HttpResponse runHttpRequest(HttpRequestBase httpRequest)
throws IOException
IOException last = null;
for (int attempt = 0; attempt < 3; attempt++) {
try {
HttpResponse response = mHttpClient.execute(httpRequest);
int statusCode = response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();
if (statusCode == 200) {
return response }
} catch (IOException e) {
httpRequest.abort();
last = e;
throw last;

I'm mostly worried about the connection being in some state which is invalid on subsequent retries. In other words, do I need to completely recreate 'httpRequest', should I avoid calling httpRequest.abort() in the catch block, and only call it in the final failure?