REfactor-ing content overhearing to improve wireless performance

Many systems have leveraged the broadcast nature of wireless radios to improve wireless capacity and performance. While conventional approaches have focused on overhearing entire packets, recent designs have argued that focusing on overheard content may be more effective. Unfortunately, key design choices in these approaches limit them from fully leveraging the benefits of overhearing content. We propose a cleaner refactoring of functionality where-in overhearing is realized at the sub-packet payload level through the use of IP-layer redundancy elimination. We show that this dramatically improves the effectiveness of prior overhearing based approaches and enables new designs, e.g., enhanced network coding, where content overhearing can be more effectively integrated to improve performance. Realizing the benefits of IP-layer content overhearing requires us to overcome challenges arising from the probabilistic nature of wireless reception (which could lead to inconsistent state) and the limited resources on wireless devices. We overcome these challenges through careful data structure and wireless redundancy elimination designs. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system using experimentation on real traces. We find that our design is highly effective: e.g., it can improve goodput by nearly 25% and air time utilization by nearly 20%.