The SoftPHY abstraction : from packets to symbols in wireless network design

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jamieson, Kyle (Kyle Andrew), 1978-
Other Authors: Hari Balakrishnan.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2009
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44420
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author Jamieson, Kyle (Kyle Andrew), 1978-
author2 Hari Balakrishnan.
author_facet Hari Balakrishnan.
Jamieson, Kyle (Kyle Andrew), 1978-
author_sort Jamieson, Kyle (Kyle Andrew), 1978-
collection MIT
description Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.
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spelling mit-1721.1/444202019-04-12T09:26:08Z The SoftPHY abstraction : from packets to symbols in wireless network design Jamieson, Kyle (Kyle Andrew), 1978- Hari Balakrishnan. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-153). 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 software-defined 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 about its confidence in each decoded symbol up to higher layers. These SoftPHY hints have many applications, one of which, more efficient link-layer retransmissions, we will describe in detail. PP-ARQ is a link-layer reliable retransmission protocol that allows a receiver to compactly encode a request for retransmission of only the bits in a packet that are likely in error. Our experimental results show that PP-ARQ increases aggregate network throughput by a factor of approximately 2x under various conditions. Finally, we will place our contributions in the context of related work and discuss other uses of SoftPHY throughout the wireless networking stack. by Kyle Andrew Jamieson. Ph.D. 2009-01-30T16:44:40Z 2009-01-30T16:44:40Z 2008 2008 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44420 289407762 eng M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 153 p. application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Jamieson, Kyle (Kyle Andrew), 1978-
The SoftPHY abstraction : from packets to symbols in wireless network design
title The SoftPHY abstraction : from packets to symbols in wireless network design
title_full The SoftPHY abstraction : from packets to symbols in wireless network design
title_fullStr The SoftPHY abstraction : from packets to symbols in wireless network design
title_full_unstemmed The SoftPHY abstraction : from packets to symbols in wireless network design
title_short The SoftPHY abstraction : from packets to symbols in wireless network design
title_sort softphy abstraction from packets to symbols in wireless network design
topic Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44420
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