Cross-Layer Based Erasure Code to Reduce the 802.11 Performance Anomaly: When FEC Meets ARF

Wireless networks have been widely accepted and deployed in our world nowadays. Consumers are now accustomed to wireless connectivity in their daily life due to the pervasiveness of the 802.11b/g and wireless LAN standards. Specially, the emergence of the next evolution of Wi-Fi technology known as 802.11n is pushing a new revolution on personal wireless communication. However, in the context, of WLAN, although multiple novel wireless access technologies have been proposed and developed to offer high bandwidth and guarantee quality of transmission, some deficiencies still remain due to the original design of WLAN-MAC layer. In particular, the performance anomaly of 802.11 is a serious issue which induces a potentially dramatic reduction of the global bandwidth when one or several mobile nodes downgrade their transmission rates following the signal degradation. In this paper, we study how the use of adaptive erasure code as a replacement of the Auto Rate Feedback mechanism can help to mitigate this performance anomaly issue. Preliminary study shows a global increase of the goodput delivered to mobile hosts attached to an access point.