P4-Based Hybrid Error Control Booster Providing New Design Tradeoffs in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Modern, general purpose error control solutions at the link and transport layers provide strong error control, suitable for most applications in most environments. There are, however, known limitations when applied to wireless, mobile and hostile environments, resulting in high latency or low throughput. This paper describes an implementation of a Hybrid Error Control (HEC) Booster that can be dynamically deployed anywhere in the network to support robust communication and provide broad design tradeoffs selectivity per application. It uses the emerging P4 standard to provide very-low latency processing of data packets that require control headers. With long burst losses, testbed results show how a pair of HEC Boosters can support either: a) high reliability and low latency using proactive parity packets, or b) high reliability and high throughput using parsimonious ACKs and incremental parities.