Abstract

At ever-increasing rates, we are using wireless systems to communicate with others and retrieve content of interest to us. Current wireless technologies such as WiFi or Zigbee use forward error correction to drive bit error rates down when there are few interfering transmissions. However, as more of us use wireless networks to retrieve increasingly rich content, interference increases in unpredictable ways. This results in errored bits, degraded throughput, and eventually, an unusable network. We observe that this is the result of higher layers working at the packet granularity, whereas they would benefit from a shift in perspective from whole packets to individual symbols. From real-world experiments on a 31-node testbed of Zigbee and softwaredefined radios, we find that often, not all of the bits in corrupted packets share fate. Thus, today’s wireless protocols retransmit packets where only a small number of the constituent bits in a packet are in error, wasting network resources. In this dissertation, we will describe a physical layer that passes information

Citations