Refactoring content overhearing to improve wireless performance

Many systems have leveraged the broadcast nature of wireless ra-dios to improve wireless capacity and performance. While con-ventional approaches have focused on overhearing entire packets, recent designs have argued that focusing on overheard content may be more effective. Unfortunately, key design choices in these ap-proaches limit them from fully leveraging the benefits of overhear-ing content. We propose a cleaner refactoring of functionality where-in overhearing is realized at the sub-packet payload level through the use of IP-layer redundancy elimination. We show that this dra-matically improves the effectiveness of prior overhearing based ap-proaches and enables new designs, e.g., enhanced network coding, where content overhearing can be more effectively integrated to improve performance. Realizing the benefits of IP-layer content overhearing requires us to overcome challenges arising from the probabilistic nature of wireless reception (which could lead to in-consistent state) and the limited resources on wireless devices. We overcome these challenges through careful data structure and wire-less redundancy elimination designs. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system using experimentation on real traces. We find that our design is highly effective: e.g., it can improve goodput by nearly 25 % and air time utilization by nearly 20%