Augmenting wide-band 802.11 transmissions via unequal packet bit protection

Abstract

Due to frequency selective fading, modern wideband 802.11 transmissions have unevenly distributed bit BERs in a packet. In this paper, we propose to unequally protect packet bits according to their BERs. By doing so, we can best match the effective transmission rate of each bit to channel condition, and improve throughput. The major design challenge lies in deriving an accurate relationship between the frequency selective channel condition and the decoded packet bit BERs, all the way through the complex 802.11 PHY layer. Based on our study, we find that the decoding error of a packet bit corresponds to dense errors in the underlying codeword bits, and the BER can be truthfully approximated by the codeword bit error density. With above observation, we propose UnPKT, scheme that protects packet bits using different MAC-layer FEC redundancies based on bit-wise BER estimation to augment wide-band 802.11 transmissions. UnPKT is software-implementable and compatible with the existing 802.11 architecture. Extensive evaluations based on Atheros 9580 NICs and GNU-Radio platforms show the effectiveness of our design. UnPKT can achieve a significant goodput improvement over state-of-the-art approaches.