Protocols and Mechanisms to Recover Failed Packets in Wireless Networks: History and Evolution

The emergence of multihop wireless networks and the increase in low-latency demands of error tolerant applications, such as voice over internet protocol, have triggered the development of new protocols and mechanisms for recovering failed packets. For example, recovering partially corrupt packets instead of retransmission has emerged as an effective way to improve key network performance metrics, such as goodput, latency, and energy consumption. A number of similar and interesting solutions have been proposed recently to either reconstruct or process corrupt packets on wireless networks. The proliferation of multimedia services on 3G and long term evolution networks, and the stringent quality of service requirements for these applications have given birth to robust codes and new error tolerant mechanisms for packet delivery. Despite years of active research in the field, we lack a comprehensive survey that summarizes recent developments in this area and highlights avenues with potential for future growth. This survey tries to fill in this void by providing a comprehensive review of the evolution of this field and underscoring areas for future research.