On Realization of Reliable Link Layer Protocols with Guaranteed Sustainable Flows for Wireless Communication

摘要

Despite major developments in link-layer design to address reliability issues associated with the wireless communication (in a presence of heavy noise), these efforts fall short on many fronts. This includes a clear demonstration regarding the viability of a truly reliable link-layer capable of providing a minimal level of guaranteed sustainable flows for the higher layers. In this paper, we present an analytical and experimental study to design and implement a reliable wireless link-layer that provides sustainable flow control. We develop an experimental platform using Software Radio Defined (SDR) technology with the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) frontend to capture and measure the behavior of an error process imposed on a wireless channel. Next, we design a Reliable And StablE (RASE) link-layer protocol to provide reliability (by achieving optimal throughput) and stability (by ensuring a sustainable traffic flow) for realtime and non-realtime wireless communications. We then incorporate the RASE protocol into the SDR-USRP platform to investigate the level of throughput and realtime stability achieved in comparison with the IEEE802.11 ARQ and the FEC-based HARQ protocols. We demonstrate experimentally that RASE provides 20%-50% improved reliability. In addition, realtime video communication experiments show a 2-8dB PSNR gain in playback quality.