Joint source-protocol-channel decoding: Improving 802.11N receivers

This paper combines joint protocol-channel (JPC) and joint source-channel (JSC) decoding techniques within a receiver in the context of wireless data transmission. It assumes that demodulation and channel decoding at physical (PHY) layer can provide soft information about the transmitted bits. At each layer of the protocol stack, JPC decoding allows headers of corrupted packets to be reliably decoded and soft information on the corresponding payload to be forwarded to the correct upper layer. When reaching the application (APL) layer, packets may still contain errors and are JSC decoded, exploiting residual redundancy present in the compressed bitstream, to remove part of the residual errors. The main contribution of this paper is to show that these tools may be efficiently combined to obtain i) reliable protocol layers permeable to transmission errors and ii) improved source decoders. Performance is evaluated using an OMNET++ simulation for the transmission of compressed HTML files (HTTP 1.1) over a standard RTP/UDP-Lite/Ipv6/MACLite/ 802:11n-PHY protocol stack, only the receiver is modified. For a given packet error rate, the proposed scheme provides gains up to 2 dB in SNR compared to a standard receiver.