Frame Fountain: Coding and decoding MAC frames

To address the large latency and degraded network throughput due to the retransmission triggered by frame loss in high speed wireless networks, this paper proposes a solution called Frame Fountain that encodes and decodes data frames in the MAC layer. This solution intelligently encodes a number of redundant frames from original frames upon link loss rate so that a receiver can effectively recover lost original frames without significant retransmissions. Meanwhile, various probability distributions are investigated to find an optimal one as the degree distribution adopted by this coding solution. Extensive experiments show that, working with a degree distribution improved upon the robust Soliton distribution, Frame Fountain can recover most of the original frames with large probability.