MISC: Merging incorrect symbols using constellation diversity for 802.11 retransmission

802.11 WLANs suffer from high packet losses due to interference and noise. Packet retransmission is a fundamental way to recover a lost packet. To extract useful information from incorrect symbols and improve retransmission efficiency, we present MISC, a packet retransmission scheme that merges incorrect symbols from multiple transmissions to produce correct ones. MISC proactively creates constellation diversity by rearranging the constellation maps in retransmissions. MISC addresses practical implementation issues and makes minimum amendments to integrate into current 802.11 WLAN framework. We implement MISC in an 802.11-based GNURadio/USRP platform and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its efficacy. Experiment results demonstrate that MISC can substantially improve the throughput.