Exploring smart pilot for partial packet recovery in super dense wireless networks

Wireless communication is prone to partial packet due to the complex behavior of wireless signal propagation, especially in the dense-deployed wireless networks, where the interference signal is unavoidable. Such packet often contains a few errors, yet has to be retransmitted due to decoding failure. To avoid redundant transmission, partial packet recovery protocols are leveraged to identify and retransmit the corrupted portion instead of the entire packet. However, the information they obtained is limited. In this paper, we investigate two kinds of pilots termed smart pilots to achieve more efficient partial packet recovery. Smart pilot incorporates two novel ideas: (1) Adaptive Hard Pilot that inserts known bits to help recovery the corrupted packet according to the retransmission scheme, and (2) Reliable Soft Pilot that utilizes the confidence information to accurately identify the corrupted portion for retransmission. With these two smart pilots, the receiver is able to recovery more partial packet, and thus the required retransmission portion is greatly reduced. Our experiments show that smart pilot reduces the BER from 10⁻² to 10⁻⁴, and improves the average throughput by 1.8× compared with the existing partial packet recovery protocols.