On-the-Fly Packet Error Recovery in a Cooperative Cluster of Mobile Devices

This paper investigates the possibility of packet error recovery in a cooperative cluster of mobile devices. We assume that these devices receive data from a broadcast transmission on their primary network interface (e.g. LTE network), and they are using a secondary network interface (e.g. ad hoc WLAN network) to form a cooperative cluster in order to exchange missing data packets among each other. Our goal is to devise a protocol that minimizes the number of packets exchanged on the secondary network whilst maximizes the number of packet errors recovered on the primary network. Moreover, we aim to repair the packet losses on-the-fly (as the data is being received), which also imposes real-time constraints on the protocol. We propose a solution based on random linear network coding to form cooperative clusters of mobile devices to facilitate the efficient exchange of information among them. We also introduce a demo application that implements this technique on Nokia phones. Then we present our testbed and the collected measurement results in order to evaluate the performance of our protocol.