Heuristic Header Error Recovery for Corrupted Network Packets

One of the most significant downsides of wireless compared to wired communication is the significantly higher error rate. This is exacerbated by traditional Internet communication that enforces bit-by-bit correctness of data, dropping packets if even only a single bit is corrupted. Such a behavior is especially wasteful when considering error-tolerant applications, for example, media streaming. For such applications, tolerating errors can be beneficial.

Previous solutions to tolerate errors in transmissions suffered from several drawbacks; most importantly, they did not take packet headers into account, instead only focusing on errors in the payload portions of packets. In this work, we present, analyze and evaluate solutions to tolerate errors in both header and payload portions of packets. First, we explain how to implement error tolerance into existing protocols at the examples of IPv4, UDP, and RTP, all while staying fully backwards compatible to the protocol specifications. We then show that a protocol-independent approach can repair errors in protocol headers and identify the connection a packet belongs to without requiring any knowledge about the protocols it works on. Finally, we focus on how to unlock the full potential of error tolerance for 802.11, by discussing the interaction of error tolerance and acknowledgments, and by proposing a novel rate adaptation algorithm suited for error-tolerant, ACK-less traffic.