TCP/IP over IEEE 802.11b WLAN: the Challenge of Harnessing Known-Corrupt Data

The two transport protocols DCCP and UDP-Lite can make use of data that are known to be erroneous, provided that the link layer hands over such data. A similar functionality has been suggested for TCP. In order to investigate the potential of these mechanisms in WiFi networks, we carried out a measurement study where we examined how often information about corrupt data reaches the transport layer when the corruption control at the link layer is disabled. Our results suggest that this may be a rare occurrence in certain scenarios.