MIXIT: The Network Meets the Wireless Channel

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 fate sharing 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 4x throughput improvement over state-of-the-art opportunistic routing.