Blind XOR: Low-Overhead Loss Recovery for Vehicular Safety Communications

Packet loss in vehicular networks can undermine the effectiveness of communication-based accident prevention systems. Traditionally, retransmission has been used to combat packet loss in communication networks. However, retransmission overhead is known to increase channel congestion in dense wireless vehicular networks, which increases the likelihood of packet loss due to collisions limiting the loss recovery capacity of the retransmission algorithm. This paper presents a low overhead retransmission algorithm called Blind XOR (BXOR). By XORing multiple packets into a single retransmission, BXOR recovers an increased number of lost packets per retransmission. BXOR keeps the overhead low by not trying to learn the loss status of the receivers via feedbacks.