LEAD: Leveraging protocol signatures for improving wireless link performance

Jun Huang, Yu Wang, Guoliang Xing

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Error correction is a fundamental problem in wireless system design as wireless links often suffer high bit error rate due to the effects of signal attenuation, multipath fading and interference. This paper presents a new cross-layer solution called LEAD to improve the performance of existing channel decoders. While the traditional wisdom of cross-layer design is to exploit physical layer information at upper-layers, LEAD represents a paradigm shift in that it leverages upper-layer protocol signatures to improve the performance of physical layer channel decoding. The approach of LEAD is motivated by two key insights. First, channel codes can correct more errors when the values of some bits, which we refer to as pilots, are known before decoding. Second, some header fields of upper-layer protocols are often fixed or highly biased toward certain values. These distinctive bit pattern signatures can thus be exploited as pilots to assist channel decoding. To realize this idea, we first characterize bit bias in real-life network traffic, and develop an efficient algorithm to extract pilot bits with assured prediction accuracy. We then propose a decoding framework to allow existing channel decoders to effectively exploit extracted pilots. We implement LEAD on GNURadio/USRP platform and evaluate its performance by replaying real-life packet traces on a testbed of 12 USRP links. Our results show that LEAD significantly improve wireless link performance, while incurring very low overhead. Specifically, LEAD reduces more than 90% bit errors for 48.9% packets, and improves the end-to-end link throughput by 1.43x to 1.93x over existing error correction schemes. Copyright 2013 ACM.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMobiSys 2013 - Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
Pages333-345
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event11th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2013 - Taipei, Taiwan
Duration: 25 Jun 201328 Jun 2013

Publication series

NameMobiSys 2013 - Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Conference

Conference11th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2013
Country/TerritoryTaiwan
CityTaipei
Period25/06/1328/06/13

Bibliographical note

Publication details (e.g. title, author(s), publication statuses and dates) are captured on an “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE” basis at the time of record harvesting from the data source. Suggestions for further amendments or supplementary information can be sent to [email protected].

Research Keywords

  • Bit predictability
  • Channel code
  • Cross-layer design
  • Decoder

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