Reading Between the Packets: Implicit Feedback in Wireless Multihop Networks

Revision with unchanged content. Wireless multihop networks exhibit a number of distinctive and interesting properties, making them a unique environment. This environment is very challenging for existing network protocols, in particular for the Internet protocol stack. For this reason the peculiarities of wireless multihop environ­ments have most often been treated as a major handicap. Here, we look at them from a different angle: they can, in fact, often provide the basis for novel and unconventional solutions. Many challenges in wireless multihop net­working can be tackled by making use of the network's specific properties. In this spirit, we propose solutions that communicate and co-ordinate actions implicitly, i.e., without dedicated information exchange. This design principle is applied to a number of research challenges in wireless multihop networks. The discussed approaches include mechanisms for unicast and multicast congestion control, end-to-end reliable transport, co-ordinated network coding, and offline time synchronization. This book addresses readers interes­ted in computer networking and protocol design, in particular researchers and developers working on wireless multihop networks.