A wireless MAC protocol with efficient packet recovery

Existing wireless medium access control (MAC) protocols provi reliability against corrupted packets by providing mechanisms for packet error detection and retransmission. The efficiency of existing mechanisms for providing reliability is usually low since they require the entire packet to be retransmitted even though only parts of it may have been corrupted. To address this issue, this paper presents a MAC protocol with an efficient packet recovery mechanism for packets corrupted due to both channel errors and collisions. The proposed MAC protocol first determines the cause of the errors in a packet and then uses the acknowledgment (ACK) packets to provide feedback on the sections of the packets that have errors. To minimize the packet recovery time, the proposed MAC protocol allows the sender to retransmit the corrupted sections of the packet immediately, without requiring a new channel access. Using simulations, it is shown that the proposed MAC protocol has higher efficiency and increases the achieved throughput.