Reliable Wireless Networking via Soft-Source Information Combining

TL;DR

This paper introduces a soft-source-information-combining (SSIC) paradigm for wireless IoT networks, enhancing reliability by combining soft information from multiple streams over existing TCP/IP networks, demonstrated through Wi-Fi experiments.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel SSIC framework with a soft descrambling method and deployable architecture, enabling ultra-reliable wireless communication without specialized hardware.

Findings

Achieved 99.99% reliable packet delivery in experiments

Lowered packet delivery failure rate significantly

Demonstrated compatibility with existing TCP/IP networks

Abstract

This paper puts forth a multi-stream networking paradigm, referred to as soft-source-information-combining (SSIC), to support wireless Internet of Things (IoT) applications with ultra-reliability requirements. For SSIC networking, an SSIC dispatcher at the source dispatches duplicates of packets over multiple streams, which may be established over different physical wireless networks. If a packet on a stream cannot be decoded due to wireless interference or noise, the decoder makes available the packet's soft information. An aggregator then combines the soft information of the duplicates to boost reliability. Of importance are two challenges: i) how to descramble the scrambled soft information from different streams to enable correct SSIC; ii) the construct of an SSIC dispatching and aggregation framework compatible with commercial network interface cards (NICs) and TCP/IP networks. To address the challenges, we put forth: i) a soft descrambling (SD) method to minimize the bit-error rate (BER) and packet-error rate (PER) at the SSIC's output; ii) an SSIC networking architecture readily deployable over today's TCP/IP networks without specialized NICs. For concept proving and experimentation, we realized an SSIC system over two Wi-Fi's physical paths in such a way that all legacy TCP/IP applications can enjoy the reliability brought forth by SSIC without modification. Experiments over our testbed corroborate the effectiveness of SSIC in lowering the packet delivery failure rate and the possibility of SSIC in providing 99.99% reliable packet delivery for short-range communication.