Budgeting power: Packet duplication and bit error rate reduction in wireless ad-hoc networks

In this paper we present and evaluate a new technique to lower packet-level error rates of application layer connections in wireless ad-hoc networks. In our scheme, data packets submitted at a connection's source are checksummed and replicated, flowing breadth-first across an overlay network towards the destination. The destination delivers the first error-free copy of each packet, in order, to the application layer, dropping packets that are corrupt or duplicate. Specifically in this paper, we consider overlays consisting of multiple parallel multi-hop paths. We provide an algorithm which determines the optimal parameters of the overlay in terms of the number of paths, their lengths, and specific routes. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms traditional routing and power allocation approaches in terms of bit error rate, even when the comparison is made under identical power consumption constraints.