Refector: heuristic header error recovery for error-tolerant transmissions

High bit error rates reduce the performance of wireless networks. This is exacerbated by the enforcement of bit-by-bit correct transmissions and the resulting retransmission overhead. Recently, research has focused on more efficient link layer mechanisms and on tolerating payload errors. Header errors, however, still cause today's network and transport protocols to drop the erroneous packets. Instead of retransmitting such packets, we investigate a novel concept (called Refector) of heuristically repairing header bit errors. Refector accepts erroneous packets on end hosts and exploits protocol knowledge and protocol state to assign packets to their correct destination applications. It operates on layers 3 and 4, is independent of the underlying MAC and PHY, and requires no changes to hardware, firmware, and communication behavior. We evaluate the Refector concept via a prototype implementation deployed in an 802.11 network. Our results show that Refector reduces packet loss in the network by more than 25% when compared to payload-error-tolerant protocols such as UDP-Lite.