Context-Aware Receiver-Driven Retransmission Control in Wireless Local Area Networks

Automatic repeat request (ARQ) techniques employed by leading wireless technologies aim at compensating the high error rates due to radio impairments, but do not offer any differentiated levels of protection. In this work, we propose to enable per-packet differentiation of link layer ARQ protection (in terms of no. of retransmissions) driven by requirements of the end applications as well as of communication protocols implemented on the mobile terminal. Experimental results demonstrate the potential benefits deriving from the proposed strategy, both on TCP data flows and MPEG-4 video streams.