Communication beyond (N)acks: wireless transmission with informative feedback

This paper introduces a scheme for improved data transmission in wireless links. The idea of the proposed scheme is to limit the amount of retransmitted data in case of errors, by using informative feedback instead of the traditionally used binary (ACK or NACK) feedback. The performance of the proposed scheme is assessed and compared to a protocol stack incorporating regular retransmission, in order to determine whether the idea of informative feedback has a potential. The estimation shows a significant improvement in goodput, when the error rate of the communication channel varies from 10^-6 to 10^-3. Software that implements the proposed scheme is made, and tests are performed in order to verify the estimations. The tests show a significant performance increase, and based on the results it is concluded, that informative feedback in communication protocols has a noticeable potential.