MIXIT: The Network Meets the Wireless Channel

Abstract

The traditional contract between the network and the lower layers states that the network does routing and the lower layers deliver correct packets. In a wireless network, however, different nodes may hear most bits in a transmission, yet none of them receives the whole packet uncorrupted. The current approach imposes fatesharing on the bits, dropping a whole packet because of a few incorrect bits. In contrast, this paper proposes MIXIT, a new architecture that performs opportunistic routing on groups of correctly received symbols. We show using simulations driven with Software Radios measurements that MIXIT provides $4$x throughput improvement over state-of-the-art opportunistic routing.