Partial Packets in Wireless Networks: A Review

Data transmission in wireless networks is vulnerable to errors, due to the nature of wireless characteristics. As a result, corrupted packets are a common case in wireless data transmissions. Many techniques have been proposed to tackle these issues and one of the recommended techniques is the partial packet recovery (PPR) scheme. There are various existing PPR methods that have been proposed, in the last two decades, in wireless networks. In addition, recent works have shown the possibility of network coding along with its capabilities in recovering the partial packets. This paper presents a review study of PPR approaches in wireless networks. We classify the approaches into several groups based on the soft information in the PHY layer. Furthermore, we describe the PPR techniques that have used in each of these groups. Our studies found that there are twenty-four protocols have been proposed using PPR to improve the performance in wireless networks.