Efficient packet recovery in wireless networks

Wireless medium access control (MAC) protocols usually provide reliability in the presence of packet errors. The efficiency of these reliability mechanisms is generally low since they require the entire packet to be retransmitted even though only parts of it may have been corrupted. To address this issue, this paper presents an efficient mechanism for the recovery of packets corrupted due to both channel errors and collisions. The proposed mechanism first determines the cause of the errors. Next, the symbols with errors are isolated by using the error vector magnitude (EVM) of received symbols as the feature for detection. Using explicit feedback about which blocks of symbols have errors, only the erroneous blocks are then retransmitted. Our results show that the proposed mechanism increases the efficiency of the MAC protocol by providing higher throughput.