Harnessing Partial Packets in Wireless Networks: Throughput and Energy Benefits
Abstract: This paper proposes a partial packet recovery scheme called packetized rateless algebraic consistency (PRAC). PRAC exploits intra intra- and inter-packet packet consistency to identify and recover erroneous packet segments, without recourse to soft physical layer (PHY) or detailed feedback information. PRAC uses a rateless linear code for data encoding coding and an iterative decoding process for data reconstruction. It allows, but does not rely upon, the use of any PHY forward error correction code, and requires no feedback other than a notification of completion and, in the absence of partial packets, incurs no overhead. In order to quantify PRAC's performance in terms of both throughput and energy efficiency, experiments are conducted using commercial transceivers in two different scenarios. Our implementation results reveal that PRAC offers an average throughput gain of 35% compared with a baseline ARQ scheme discarding partial packets, and 13% compared with an ideal hybrid hybrid-ARQ ARQ scheme. On high PER links, throughput is improved by 148% and 34%, respectively. In addition, PRAC reduces on average the totall energy consumption of the transmitting nodes by 16%, while, on high PER links, savings can be up to 50%.