Performance Improvement in Ad hoc Wireless Networks with Consideration to Packet Duplication

Summary Flexible Radio Network (FRN), one of the ad hoc wireless network systems, adopts an original protocol, which includes a packet retransmission mechanism against packet transmission errors. While this mechanism intends to improve packet reachability, it sometimes causes unnecessary packet duplications and degrades the network performance due to a lack of a capability that differentiates packet transmission errors and acknowledgement errors. In the latter case, packet retransmission causes packet duplication because only acknowledgement (ACK) packet is lost in actual. In this paper, we investigate the packet duplication process of FRN and suggest performance improvement techniques. Through simulation, it is shown that those techniques can actually decrease the number of duplicated packets and improve the network performance.