Enabling MAC Protocol Implementations on Software-Defined Radios

Partial packet recovery protocols attempt to repair corrupted packets instead of retransmitting them in their entirety. Recent approaches have used physical layer confidence estimates or additional error detection codes embedded in each transmission to identify corrupt bits, or have applied forward error correction to repair without such explicit knowledge. In contrast to these approaches, the authors' goal is a practical design that simultaneously: requires no extra bits in correct packets, reduces recovery latency, except in rare instances, remains compatible with existing 802.11 devices by obeying timing and back-off standards, and can be incrementally deployed on widely available access points and wireless cards.