Efficient symbol-level transmission in error-prone wireless networks

Providing reliable transmission over error-prone networks has received a lot of attention from the research community. In this paper, instead of using simple retransmissions to provide reliability, we consider a novel retransmission approach based on the importance of the bits (symbols). We study the problem of maximizing the total gain in the case of partial data delivery in error-prone wireless networks, in which each set of bits (symbols) has a different weight. We first address the case of one-hop single packet transmission, and prove that the optimal solution has a round-robin transmission pattern. Then, we extend our solution to the case of multiple packets. We also enhance the expected gain using random linear network coding. Our simulation results show that our proposed multiple packets transmission mechanism can increase the gain up to 60% compared to that of a simple retransmission. Moreover, our network coding scheme enhances the expected total gain up to 15% compared to our non-coding mechanism.