Packet Corruption Research Articles

Age of Information in Physical-Layer Network Coding Enabled Two-Way Relay Networks

This paper investigates information freshness of two-way relay networks (TWRNs) operated with physical-layer network coding (PNC). Information freshness is quantified by age of information (AoI), defined as the time elapsed since the generation time of the latest received information update. PNC reduces communication latency of TWRNs by turning superimposed electromagnetic waves into network-coded messages so that end users can send update packets to each other more frequently via the relay. While sending update packets more frequently has the potential to reduce AoI, how to handle packet corruption has not been investigated. Specifically, if an old packet is corrupted in any hop of a TWRN, one needs to decide whether to drop or to retransmit the old packet. Therefore, we study the average AoI with and without automatic repeat request (ARQ) in PNC-enabled TWRNs. Interestingly, our analysis shows that neither the non-ARQ scheme nor the pure ARQ scheme achieves a good average AoI. Hence, we put forth an uplink-lost-then-drop (ULTD) protocol that combines packet drop and ARQ. Experiments on software-defined radios indicate that ULTD significantly outperforms non-ARQ and pure ARQ schemes in terms of average AoI, especially when the two end users have imbalanced channel conditions. We believe the insight of ULTD on TWRNs generally applies to other two-hop networks.

Design and Suitability Analysis of FPGA-Based TCP/IP Offload Module for Control Systems of FBRs

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) offload modules play a crucial role in India’s first commercial fast breeder reactor (PFBR) distributed digital control system architecture by providing networking capabilities to the real-time control systems used in safety-critical and safety-related applications of the PFBR. These modules enable operators to remotely control various mechanisms, facilities, and process loops via real-time control systems from the main control room display stations. The malfunctioning of these modules may hamper the overall plant’s availability; hence to improve further upon safety, security, reliability, and performance, these modules have been indigenously developed for upcoming fast breeder reactors in India. This paper proposes methods to justify the suitability of these communication modules as per the D-25 design guidelines issued by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board of India. The design and testing aspects are covered, including an approach toward hardware descriptive language-based design and testing with respect to the IEEE standard and the TCP/IP protocol specifications. Module design validation based on ethernet frame transactions is detailed in this paper. The test platform design, which includes the diagnostics software design for CPUs designed with these TCP offload modules, and the design of a graphical user interface to detect and record TCP connection anomalies are detailed. The network interface response to postulated events of TCP packet corruption, packet drop, packet delay, out-of-order packets, duplicate packets, and heavy traffic is characterized.

Analyzing and Optimizing Packet Corruption in RDMA Network

Analyzing and Optimizing Packet Corruption in RDMA Network

Transmission Efficiency of Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) and Bundle Protocol (BP) in DTN Architecture

From Near-Earth orbit (NEO) to Earth-Sun Lagrangian points will continue to be a majority of Near Earth missions ranging from Near-Earth orbit (NEO) to Earth-Sun Lagrangian points will continue to be a majority of future space missions. A few works have been done with delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) technology for Near-Earth orbit (NEO)-space center and deep space communications and provided feasibility for its adoption in NEO-space and deep space missions. [1] However, no much work has been done to fully evaluate the transmission efficiency of DTN in such an environment, especially in the presence of long link disruption, data corruption and lost rate, and link asymmetry. In this paper, we present an experimental performance evaluation of DTN architecture and protocol stack, with Licklider transmission protocol (LTP) serving as a convergence layer adapter (CLA) underneath bundle protocol (BP), in typical NEO-satellite system and deep space communication infrastructures accompanied by a very long link delay, various packet corruption and lost rates, and channel rate symmetry and asymmetry. In addition, we present an experimental research of the transmission efficiency of DTN custody transfer with long link delay. The experiment was conducted by performing realistic file transfers over a virtual server-based test-bed.

Transmission Performance of Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) and Bundle Protocol (BP) in DTN Architecture

From Near-Earth orbit (NEO) to Earth-Sun Lagrangian points will continue to be a majority of future space exploration quests. A few works have been done with long distance delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) technology for Near-Earth orbit (NEO) transmission and provided feasibility for its adoption in NEO and long distance exploration quests. [1] However, no much work has been done to fully evaluate the performance of DTN architecture in such an environment, especially in the presence of long link disruption, data corruption and loss, and link asymmetry. [2] In this research, we present an experimental performance evaluation of DTN architecture and protocol stack, with Licklider transmission protocol (LTP) serving as a convergence layer adapter (CLA) underneath bundle protocol (BP), in typical NEO and long distance transmission infrastructures accompanied by a very long link outage, various packet corruption and loss rates, and channel rate symmetry and asymmetry. [3] In addition, we present an experimental investigation of the performance of DTN custody transfer with long link break. The experiment was conducted by performing realistic file transfers over a virtual server test-bed.

Interference mitigation and optimal hop distance measurement in distributed homogenous nodes over wireless sensor network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is in large use in today’s world against the challenges encountered in the Sensor world. Energy consumption, routing, interference mitigation are a matter of concern in WSN. Perhaps, overruling interference mitigation would solve a number of interconnected problems in WSN. The proposed work is narrowed down to minimize interference in distributed homogenous WSN, ensuring that all the nodes in the network operate with the same transmission power. In this paper, an optimal shortest distance algorithm, Dynamic-Optimal Shortest Path Algorithm (DOSPA) is proposed to identify the shortest path in communication between point to point nodes. As the data traverses a number of intermediary nodes, a privileged network topology has to be built to ensure proper transmission of data. An ideal network topology is hence built dynamically for data transmission. However, a collision between data packets in interconnecting nodes is likely to occur. Furthermore, to minimize collision a non-persistent round-robin CSMA/CD algorithm is proposed. We study the network throughput, packet delay, corruption ratio by increasing the number of nodes and hence also analyzing the system in saturation state. It’s found that Packet Corruption Ratio (PCR) with CSMA+DOSPA is minimized compared to CSMA. Thus, interference reduction in distributed homogenous nodes is substantially minimized.

Collision Recognition in Multihop IEEE 802.15.4-Compliant Wireless Sensor Networks

Collisions caused by the hidden terminal effects may result in severe packet corruption and performance degradation in multihop IEEE 802.15.4-compliant wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In order to avoid such collisions through scheduling protocols, it is important to first recognize these collisions by distinguishing them from some other noncollision cases (e.g., path loss, multipath fading, shadow fading, and IEEE 802.11 interference), which may also lead to similar consequences. In this paper, we focus on the collision recognition problem in multihop IEEE 802.15.4-compliant WSNs. First, through a series of measurements of the error properties in various collision and noncollision scenarios, we investigate the statistical behaviors of error patterns including the bit error rate and error position distribution, which reveal obvious differences between collision and noncollision cases in terms of bit- and symbol-level error position distribution. Based on these observations, we further propose a machine learning-based collision recognition mechanism by inserting some redundant blocks in a data frame. The inserted blocks are known to both the sender and receiver, thereby it enables the receiver to recognize the error patterns only according to the redundant sequences. Moreover, a mutual information-guided byte selection technique is also provided to effectively improve the recognition accuracy. Finally, the proposed mechanism is verified under three different transmission environments. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism achieves good recognition accuracy over 90% with 94% coding efficiency.

Measuring the Effect of Packet Corruption Ratio on Quality of Experience (QoE) in Video Streaming

The volume of Internet video traffic which consists of downloaded or streamed video from the Internet is projected to increase from 42,029PB monthly in 2016 to 159,161PB monthly, in 2021, representing a 31% increase in the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). The market for mobile network operators is unpredictable, fast-paced and very competitive. End users now have more options when choosing service providers. With superior network Quality of Experience (QoE), service providers can increase margins by charging more for better quality. Packet corruption occurs when the receiver cannot correctly decode transmitted bits. This study identified the threshold at which the QoE of video streaming services became unacceptable due to the effect of packet corruption. In this paper, several experiments were carried out on video streaming services, creating disturbances to evaluate the user satisfaction level using the mean opinion scores. Network Emulator (NetEm) tool was used to create the packet corruption experienced during the video sessions and the QoE for different packet corruption percentages was established. From the experiments conducted, we found that user QoE decreased as the Packet Corruption Ratio (PCR) increased. With knowledge of the effect of the PCR, service providers can ensure that the PCR is kept within acceptable limits from end-to-end and this will ultimately lead to superior QoE from end users, which will in turn translate to improved subscriber base and profitability.

Fault-Tolerant Unicast-Based Multicast for Reliable Network-on-Chip Testing

We present a unified test technique that targets faults in links, routers, and cores of a network-on-chip design based on test sessions. We call an entire procedure, that delivers test packets to the subset of routers/cores, a test session. Test delivery for router/core testing is formulated as two fault-tolerant multicast algorithms. Test packet delivery for routers is implemented as a fault-tolerant unicast-based multicast scheme via the fault-free links and routers that were identified in the previous test sessions to avoid packet corruption. A new fault-tolerant routing algorithm is also proposed for the unicast-based multicast core test delivery in the whole network. Identical cores share the same test set, and they are tested within the same test session. Simulation results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing test time.

Localization Free Energy Efficient and Cooperative Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Mitigation of channel unfavorable circumstances during data routing in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) has utmost significance. It guarantees saving packet corruption along unfavorable channels so that vital data is not lost or become meaningless. This paper proposes two routing protocols for UWSNs: localization free energy efficient routing (LFEER) and its improved version, localization free energy efficient cooperative routing (Co-LFEER). The LFEER makes decision of choosing a relay based on its maximum residual energy, number of hops and the bit error rate of the link over which packets are transmitted. These metrics are chosen to save packets from corruption to the maximum limit and maintain stable paths (where nodes do not die soon). Since a single link is used in the LFEER for packets forwarding, the link may become worse with changing circumstances of the channel. To deal with this issue, cooperative routing is added to the LFFER to construct the Co-LFEER protocol, in which some copies of packets are received by destination to decide about packets quality. Converse to some prevalent protocols, both LFEER and Co-LFEER are independent of knowing the sensor nodes’ positions, which increases computational complexity and wasteful utilization of resources. Based on extensive simulations, the proposed schemes are better than Co-DBR in reducing energy utilization and advancing packets to the desired destination.

Embracing Corruption Burstiness: Fast Error Recovery for ZigBee under Wi-Fi Interference

The ZigBee communication can be easily and severely interfered by Wi-Fi traffic. Error recovery, as an important means for ZigBee to survive Wi-Fi interference, has been extensively studied in recent years. The existing works add upfront redundancy to in-packet blocks for recovering a certain number of random corruptions. Therefore, the bursty nature of ZigBee in-packet corruptions under Wi-Fi interference is often considered harmful, since some blocks are full of errors which cannot be recovered and some blocks have no errors but are still requiring redundancy. As a result, they often use interleaving to reshape the bursty errors, before applying complex FEC codes to recover the re-shaped random distributed errors. In this paper, we take a different view that burstiness may be helpful. With burstiness, the in-packet corruptions are often consecutive and the requirement for error recovery is reduced as “recovering any k consecutive errors” instead of “recovering any random k errors”. This lowered requirement allows us to design far more efficient code than the existing FEC codes. Motivated by this implication, we exploit the corruption burstiness to design a simple yet effective error recovery code using XOR operations (called ZiXOR). ZiXOR uses XOR code and the delay is significantly reduced. More, ZiXOR uses RSSI-hinted approach to detect in packet corruptions without CRC, incurring almost no extra transmission overhead. The testbed evaluation results show that ZiXOR outperforms the state-of-the-art works in terms of the throughput (by 47 percent) and latency (by 22 percent).

On Improving Wireless Channel Utilization: A Collision Tolerance-Based Approach

Packet corruption caused by collision is a critical problem that hurts the performance of wireless networks. Conventional medium access control (MAC) protocols resort to collision avoidance to maintain acceptable efficiency of channel utilization. According to our investigation and observation, however, collision avoidance comes at the cost of miscellaneous overhead, which oppositely hurts channel utilization, not to mention the poor resiliency and performance of those protocols in face of dense networks or intensive traffic. Discovering the ability to tolerate collisions at the physical layer implementations of wireless networks, we in this paper propose Coco, a protocol that advocates simultaneous accesses from multiple senders to a shared channel, i.e., optimistically allowing collisions instead of simply avoiding them. With a simple but effective design, Coco addresses the key challenges in achieving collision tolerance, such as precise sender alignment and the control of transmission concurrency. We implement Coco in 802.15.4 networks and evaluate its performance through extensive experiments with 21 TelosB nodes. The results demonstrate that Coco is light-weight and enhances channel utilization by at least 20 percent in general cases, compared with state-of-the-arts protocols.

UPMAC: A Localized Load-Adaptive MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Unlike terrestrial networks that mainly rely on radio waves for communications, underwater networks utilize acoustic waves, which have comparatively lower loss and longer range in underwater environments. However, acoustic waves incurs long propagation delays that typically lead to low throughput and higher energy cost of transmission than reception. Thus, collision and retransmission should be reduced in order to reduce energy cost and improve throughput. Receiver-based protocols, like receiver-initiated packet train and cluster-based on-demand time sharing, can significantly reduce collision and retransmission. But they are either time-consuming or energy consuming because nodes are controlled to turn into receiver mode by control packets or a timer regardless of load. In this paper, we propose an underwater practical MAC protocol (UPMAC), whose objective is to be adaptive to the network load conditions by providing two modes (high and low load modes) and switching between them based on different offered load. Turn-around time overhead is reduced and it is less vulnerable to control packet corruption by using the technique of piggyback. UPMAC uses receiver-based approach in high load mode, leading to a low data collision rate in both one-hop and multihop situation. Extensive simulations show that UPMAC can achieve better performance in both general and Sea Swarm topologies.

Parallel TCP and scalable video coding for jitter free video transmission over MIMO wireless networks

There is a significant rise in demand for video transmission over 3G and 4G wireless networks due to the rising popularity of video streaming websites such as YouTube. The market for video streaming over wireless networks is expected to increase sharply in the future. Both of the two basic transport layer protocols without modifications are not suited for video transmission over wireless networks. UDP (user datagram protocol) suffers from inherent unreliability, resulting in corrupted video due to frequent corruption of packets. Inherent features of wireless networks such as noise, interference, etc. result in packet corruption. On the other hand, the performance of TCP (transmission control protocol) is worse than UDP (Thangaraj et al. in Telecommun Syst 45(4):303---312, 2010) because of frequently corrupted packets. Due to its reliable data transfer feature, TCP continuously retransmits the corrupted packet until successful reception at the receiver. This leads to jitter in video playback and poor end user quality of experience. Multiple TCP connections with appropriate optimization can lead to an increased efficiency of bandwidth utilization in comparison to single TCP based video transmission over wireless networks. It has been shown that multiple TCP connections enhance the video transmission and playback experience by providing reliable communication. The parallel TCP scheme proposed in this paper enhances the quality of video transmission and playback experience over MIMO wireless networks employing scalable hierarchical wavelet decomposition based video encoding with multiple TCP connections.

Collision Tolerance: Improving Channel Utilization with Correlatable Symbol Sequences in Wireless Networks

Packet corruption caused by collision is a critical problem that damages the performance of wireless networks. Traditional medium access control (MAC) protocols resort to collision avoidance to improve the efficiency of channel utilization. According to our investigation, however, collision avoidance causes time delay, which also hurts channel utilization, especially in the dense networks or intensive traffic. Discovering the ability to tolerate collisions with the correlatable preamble at the physical layer implementations of wireless networks, we propose CWM in this paper, a MAC protocol that advocates simultaneous accesses from multiple senders to a shared channel, allowing collisions instead of avoiding them. With the correlatable sequences, CWM addresses the challenges in achieving collision tolerance, such as precise sender alignment and control of the transmission concurrency. We implement the experiments on USRP verifying the feasibility of our protocol and implement CWM in 802.15.4 networks and evaluate its performance with 100 nodes on MATLAB. The results demonstrate that our protocol significantly improves the spatial reuse of the wireless channel by at least 23% compared with the state-of-the-art protocols.

Relevance-based partial reliability in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks can provide valuable information for a lot of measurement, tracking, surveillance, automation, and general-purpose monitoring applications. Information as humidity, temperature, pressure, infrared images, and noises will be sensed and packetized for distribution over the network, but corruption during transmission may compromise the accuracy of the retrieved information and even put people in danger. In fact, the sensed data may have different relevancies for the applications, altering the impact of packet corruptions. We propose a relevance-based partially reliable transmission approach to provide data delivery with different reliability guaranties, exploiting the relevancies of transmitted data when choosing the proper error recovery service. In this context, some error scenarios are investigated, considering different configurations of error bursts. We expect that the proposed partially reliable transmission mechanism can save energy over the network while assuring acceptable quality for sensing monitoring.

Analysis and experimental evaluation of rate adaptation with transmit buffer information

In hardware, packet loss may happen due to overflow at a finite-depth transmit buffer in addition to the packet corruption in the channel. To reduce such losses and further improve spectral efficiency via rate selection, we exploit either statistical or instantaneous knowledge of transmit buffer occupancy and source packet distribution in IEEE 802.11-based systems, which have highly variable frame durations. We consider a traditional method of rate adaptation based on channel quality information and evaluate the throughput gain in hardware when the buffer occupancy and source packet distribution information are known. Our optimization objective is to maximize the throughput with constant transmit power since most wireless standards (e.g., 802.11, Bluetooth, ZigBee) operate in this manner. We study both cases with and without probe packets during the transmission. By evaluating the effect of diverse buffer sizes with different packet arrival distributions, both our theoretical analysis and our experimental results show that the throughput can be improved as much as 35% when the source packet distribution and buffer status information are exploited.

CURD: Controllable reactive jamming detection in underwater sensor networks

Underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) are vulnerable to jamming attacks. Controllable reactive jamming is a kind of realistic and very harmful jamming attack. A reactive jammer controls the probability of jamming and the duration of the jam signal, in order to maintain high vulnerability with low detection probability. The existing works on reactive jamming detection are focused on terrestrial wireless sensor networks (TWSNs), and are limited in their ability to (a) detect jamming correctly, (b) distinguish between the corrupted and uncorrupted parts of a packet, and (c) be adaptive with the dynamic environment. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric cumulative sum (CUSUM)-test and weak estimation learning automata (WELA)-based scheme, named CURD, for controllable reactive jamming detection. In the proposed scheme, the CUSUM-test allows to quickly find the abrupt changes in bits without any a priori knowledge about the adversary, and the learning scheme helps in “absorbing” the impact of the dynamism in the environment. Unlike the existing works on this issue, we introduce the concept of partial-packet (PP) for analyzing a packet in different fragments (i.e., PPs) to identify packet corruption in few bits.We develop a Markov chain-based analytical model for theoretical analysis of the proposed scheme, CURD, under the consideration of a single controllable reactive jammer. We evaluate the performance of CURD through simulation studies in a UWSN environment. Results show that the proposed scheme is capable of accurately detecting reactive jamming in UWSNs, and outperforms the benchmark scheme considered in the study.

Improving the Packet Delivery Performance for Concurrent Packet Transmissions in WSNs

In this letter, we investigate the properties of packet collisions in IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor networks when packets with the same content are transmitted concurrently. While the nature of wireless transmissions allows the reception of a packet when the same packet is transmitted at different radios with (near) perfect time synchronization, we find that in practical systems, platform specific characteristics, such as the independence and error of the crystal oscillators, cause packets to collide disruptively when the two signals have similar transmission powers (i.e., differences of <;2 dBm). In such scenarios, the packet reception ratio (PRR) of concurrently transmitted packets falls below 10%. Nevertheless, we empirically show that the packet corruption patterns are easily recoverable using forward error correction schemes and validate this using implementations of RS and convolutional codes. Overall, our results show that using such error correction schemes can increase the PRR by more than four-fold.

Channel Diagnostics for Wireless Sensor Networks in Harsh Industrial Environments

Wireless sensor network communication in industrial environments is compromised by interference, multipath fading, and signal attenuation. In that respect, accurate channel diagnostics is imperative to selecting the adequate countermeasures. This paper presents the lightweight packet error discriminator (LPED) that infers the wireless link condition by distinguishing between errors caused by multipath fading and attenuation, and those inflicted by interfering wideband single-channel communication systems (e.g., IEEE 802.11b/g), based on the differences in their error footprints. The LPED uses forward error correction in a novel context, namely, to determine the symbol error density, which is then fed to a discriminator for error source classification. The classification criteria are derived from an extensive set of error traces collected in three different types of industrial environments, and verified on a newly collected set of error traces. The proposed solution is evaluated both offline and online, in terms of classification accuracy, speed of channel diagnostics, and execution time. The results show that in ≥91% of cases, a single packet is sufficient for a correct channel diagnosis, accelerating link state inference by at least 270%, compared with the relevant state-of-the-art approaches. The execution time of LPED, for the worst case of packet corruption and maximum packet size, is below 30 ms with ≤3% of device memory consumption. Finally, live tests in an industrial environment show that LPED quickly recovers from link outage, by losing up to two packets on average, which is only one packet above the theoretical minimum.