Transporting large amounts of data over the wireless links of a mobile ad hoc network requires mitigating significant and unpredictable packet loss. Traditional acknowledgment-based transport protocols (e.g. TCP) perform poorly as ACK messages are dropped and the transport falls back on retransmission timeouts. We propose a novel application-layer transport system, AprilFEC, that employs erasure codes to ensure reliable delivery over lossy, time-varying wireless links. Moreover, AprilFEC minimizes added overhead by estimating packet loss rates and adapting its encoding level accordingly. We show that AprilFEC delivers large media files over lossy, time-varying links more reliably than a traditional TCP-based system.
@inproceedings{marcotte2017aprilfec, AUTHOR = {Ryan J. Marcotte and Xipeng Wang and Edwin Olson}, TITLE = {AprilFEC: Real-Time Channel Estimation and Adaptive Forward Error Correction}, MONTH = {July}, YEAR = {2017}, BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of the RSS Workshop on Robot Communication in the Wild}, }