Dropped-Packets Repair and Recovery for Delay-Tolerant

Wireless Systems Using Retroactive Interference Cancellation

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CITATION

Ahmed, Ashfaq; Al-Dweik, Arafat; Iraqi, Youssef; Damiani, Ernesto (2022): Dropped-Packets Repair and
Recovery for Delay-Tolerant Wireless Systems Using Retroactive Interference Cancellation. TechRxiv.
Preprint. https://doi.org/10.36227/techrxiv.19948259.v1

DOI

10.36227/techrxiv.19948259.v1

Dropped-Packets Repair and Recovery for
Delay-Tolerant Wireless Systems Using Retroactive
Interference Cancellation
A. Ahmed, Senior Member, IEEE, A. Al-Dweik, Senior Member, IEEE,
Y. Iraqi, Senior Member, IEEE, E. Damiani, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Data download and storage over wireless networks
is a popular application for various multimedia such as images,
audio, and video files. In such applications, the end-user may
listen to or watch the downloaded media in real-time, and/or
will playback the downloaded file multiple times in the future.
Consequently, improving the quality of the stored multimedia will
be highly desirable by the end-user, even if the initial real-time
version had less quality. Therefore, this work proposes a novel
technique to improve the throughput of wireless networks that
adopt nonorthogonal transmission and automatic repeat request
(ARQ). Unlike conventional systems, the proposed scheme stores
the dropped data packets for further offline processing where
some packets can be recovered by applying successive interfer-
ence cancellation (SIC) in a retroactive manner. Consequently,
the proposed packet repair and recovery (PRR) scheme can
improve the reliability of the received data without additional
packet retransmission, which may offer a significant throughput
gain. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, it
is applied to image transmission for transportation systems.
The obtained results confirm that a considerable portion of the
dropped packets can be successfully recovered and the visual
quality of the received image can be improved. In particular
scenarios, the obtained results show that the proposed PRR
technique managed to reduce the packet drop rate (PDR) from
10−1 to 10−3 , i.e., 100 fold, which implies that 99% of the packets
that were initially dropped were successfully recovered.
Index Terms—Automatic repeat request (ARQ), nonorthogonal
Multiple access (NOMA), throughput, non-Orthogonal Multi-
plexing (NOM), packet drop.
I. I NTRODUCTION
M ULTIMEDIA communications currently correspond to
the major portion of traffic of wireless networks. For
example, mobile video traffic accounted for 59% of the total
mobile data traffic in 2017, and is expected to reach 79% in
2022 as per Cisco report [1]. For multimedia communications,
particularly video, reliability, spectral utilization, power con-
sumption, and high data rate transmission requirements have
A. Ahmed is with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Com-
puter Science, Khalifa University, 127788 Abu Dhabi, UAE (email: ash-
faq.ahmed@ku.ac.ae)
A. Al-Dweik is with the Center for Cyber-Physical Systems (C2PS), Khalifa
University, 127788 Abu Dhabi, UAE, and also with the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Western University, London, ON N6A
3K7, Canada (e-mail: dweik@fulbrightmail.org; arafat.dweik@ku.ac.ae)
Y. Iraqi is with the School of Computer Science, Mohammed VI Polytech-
nic University, Ben Guerir, Morocco (email: youssef.iraqi@um6p.ma)
E. Damiani is with the Center of Cyber-Physical Systems, Khalifa Univer-
sity, Abu Dhabi 127788, UAE (e-mail: ernesto.damiani@ku.ac.ae).
1
emerged as key challenges. In particular scenarios, multimedia
transmission might require ultra reliable low latency commu-
nications (URLLC) services [2]. Therefore, extensive research
efforts are being devoted to enabling beyond 5G (B5G) and 6th
generation (6G) cellular networks to handle such challenging
requirements. An extensive list of 5th generation (5G) and 6G
technologies is given in [3].
Although there are several solutions that can be used to
verify and improve the data reliability over wireless networks,
automatic repeat request (ARQ) is widely used because it can
provide closed-loop error correction through a hand-shaking
process between the transmitter and receiver [4]. Therefore, it
can be used to provide a guaranteed reliability level, which is
different from forward error correction coding that provides
best-effort reliability. However, ARQ is mainly based on the
repetitive transmission of packets that could not be detected
successfully at the receiver. Consequently, ARQ may degrade
the power and spectral efficiency of the system, and increase
the delay [4]. Moreover, the number of transmissions per
packet is usually limited to avoid severe delays, time jitter,
power consumption, and throughput deterioration. Therefore,
certain packets will be dropped if they are not successfully
detected after a certain number of transmissions. The limitation
on the number of allowed retransmissions might be also
enforced by the application itself. For example, unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in various applica-
tions, an example is depicted in Fig. 1 for an intelligent
transportation system (ITS). In such scenarios, the UAV is
expected to communicate data, images or videos while moving
[5], which makes it challenging to have a large number of
retransmissions. A similar argument can be made for low-
earth orbit (LEO) satellites [6]. The impact of dropped packets
depends on the application in use. In certain applications, the
end-user might initiate the transmission process again, or the
transmission will continue, but with a degraded quality.
In addition to reliable data transmission, spectrum scarcity is
another critical challenge for future wireless communications.
Therefore, the design of spectrally-efficient multiple access
schemes and signal designs is currently attracting massive
attention. In terms of multiple access, non-orthogonal multiple
access (NOMA) is considered a key technology and a potential
solution to the spectrum scarcity problem [7]–[17]. Similar to
NOMA, non-orthogonal multiplexing (NOM) has the capa-
bility to improve the spectral efficiency for wireless systems
2
UAV to
UAV
trajectory
UAV
forwarding
receiving
pictures
pictures
UAV relocates to
deliver pictures to
police station
Police
headquarter
Traffic
monitoring
Camera
transmitting
pictures
Fig. 1: Illustrative example for image transmission applications
in transportation systems.
by opportunistically exploiting good channel conditions to
multiplex several data packets in the same transmission slot
[18], [19]. NOMA generally needs ARQ to guarantee a certain
quality of service (QoS) provision [20]–[22], while NOM is
designed particularly for systems that incorporate ARQ.
A. Related Work
The combined NOMA and ARQ techniques have been
investigated in several literary works. In [23], it is shown that
NOMA-assisted hybrid-ARQ (HARQ) outperforms orthogonal
multiple access (OMA)-HARQ in terms of outage probability.
A trade-off between the allocated power levels and number
of transmissions in a NOMA-HARQ with chase combining
(CC) is presented in [20], where it is shown that HARQ-
CC with NOMA can provide a substantial gain in terms of
outage probability. The performance of a cooperative network
with NOMA-ARQ/HARQ error control methods is studied
in [24]. A notable throughput gain is reported as compared
to conventional OMA transmission. Because larger packets
adversely affect reliability, the concept of short-packet com-
munications has been considered. For example, the authors
in [25] proposed a NOMA assisted ARQ system for short-
packet communications to ensure ultra-reliability and increase
the throughput. An efficient power allocation strategy for a
HARQ-CC enabled NOMA system is proposed in [21]. An
effective NOMA-assisted HARQ system for ultra-reliability is
introduced in [26], where the retransmitted packet and the new
packet share the channel resource and the received packets
are combined to improve the effective signal to noise ratio
(SNR). The performance of the HARQ-CC and HARQ with
incremental redundancy (IR) aided NOMA systems is studied
in [27]. The performance is evaluated in terms of outage
probability concerning the transmission power, i.e., diversity
order. A dynamic power allocation scheme is presented in
a NOMA-HARQ based transmission scheme in [28], which
leads to a reduced number of retransmissions. Finally, the
performance of two users in downlink NOMA using HARQ-
CC is studied in [29].
B. Motivation
Multimedia communications are generally considered a
time-sensitive application. For example, video streaming can-
not tolerate large time jitter or delay because that will signifi-
cantly deteriorate the video quality. Similarly, UAVs and LEOs
have to send images and videos in a timely manner. However,
in most of these applications, the end-user will most likely
save the received data for archiving, or for replaying at a later
time. In certain applications, the multimedia files are stored
for archiving without immediate human observation, as in the
case of surveillance cameras. Therefore, it would be highly
desirable by-end users to have multimedia content stored with
high quality, even though the live version did not have the
same quality. However, in typical communications systems, if
a packet is dropped during transmission, then generally there
is no point to try repairing or recovering such packets at a
later time because such packets are typically independent, and
future received packets will not have any impact on a dropped
packet. However, when NOMA or NOM are integrated with
ARQ, then the scenario is significantly different where a
large number of packets can be correlated. Consequently, the
outcome detecting the ith packet may affect the detection
of packets 1, 2, . . . , i − 1 and packets i + 1, i + 2, . . . , M .
Based on an extensive literature search, and to the best of the
authors’ knowledge, there is no work in the open literature
that considered exploiting the packets’ correlation to repair
and recover the dropped packet in communications systems
that adopt nonorthogonal transmission and ARQ.
C. Contributions
The main contributions of the work can be summarized as
follows:
1) A novel packet repair and recovery technique is proposed
to revive the dropped packets in an off-line manner, and
thus, improve the quality of the stored version of the
received data.
2) The proposed scheme is performed by exploiting the
correlation between the received packets due to the
nonorthogonal transmission. The proposed scheme does
not require any new retransmission of any packet, and
thus, it does not affect the system throughput, spectrum
efficiency or power efficiency. However, the cost is some
additional storage and computational power requirements,
which are currently very affordable.
3) The proposed scheme is applied to NOM and the appli-
cation to NOMA is discussed.
4) The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in
terms of the packet drop rate and buffering requirements.
Moreover, the proposed scheme is tested for image trans-
mission applications where the performance is evaluated
using the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and visually
based on the processed images.
5) The obtained results show that the proposed scheme can
significantly reduce the number of dropped packets and
improve the PSNR and the visual image quality.
 3

D. Paper Organization A. Packet Correlation in NOM

Sec. II introduces the ARQ system model. Sec. III describes
the proposed packet repair and recovery (PRR) scheme. Sec.
IV presents a use case for image transmission. Sec. V discusses
the results, and Sec. VI draws the conclusions.
II. ARQ S YSTEM M ODEL
The ARQ system considered in this work consists of a
transmitter that needs to transmit M packets to the receiver
through a wireless link, where each packet consists of B bits.
The transmitter and receiver communicate using a truncated
ARQ with stop-and-wait (SW) flow control protocol with
a maximum number of transmissions of L, including the
initial transmission [4]. A packet that fails the error check
following its L transmissions is dropped. The channel between
the transmitter and receiver is modeled as a block fading
channel, i.e., the channel remains constant during a single
transmission session but varies randomly over consecutive
transmission sessions. Therefore, the received sequence during
the `th transmission session of packet i can be written as,
q 
(`) (`) (`) (`) (`) ` ∈ {1, 2, . . . , L}
yi = hi p i x i + wi , (1)
i ∈ {1, 2, . . . , M }
where p is the transmission power, the channel frequency
(`)
responses (CFRs) hi ∀{i, `} are independent and identically
(`)
distributed (i.i.d.), hi ∼ CN (0, σh2 ), w is the additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) vector, w = [w1 , w2 , . . . , wB ],
(`) 2
wi ∼ CN (0, σw ) are i.i.d. ∀{i, `}. The transmitted data
packet xi = [xi,1 , xi,2 , . . . , xi,B ] where the data symbols are
selected from a particular constellation such as phase shift
keying (PSK) or quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM).
The receiver detects the received sequence yi and checks
its transmission counter `, if ` = 1, then yi is detected
to obtain the estimated version of xi , denoted as x̂i . The
packet detection process is denoted as x̂i = D1 {yi }, and it
is performed by using maximum likelihood detection (MLD)
for each symbol in the received sequence. Finally, the receiver
verifies if xi = x̂i using certain error detection schemes such
as cyclic redundancy check (CRC). If the CRC indicates that
xi = x̂i , then an acknowledgment (ACK) is sent to instruct
the transmitter to send packet xi+1 . Otherwise, a negative
acknowledgment (NACK) is sent to instruct the transmitter
to resend xi . However, if ` > 1, CC is used to combine
(1) (2) (`)
yi , yi , . . . , yi , and then the combined sequence is de-
tected and remaining processes are similar to the case where
` = 1. The CC process in this case is similar to the maximum
ratio combining (MRC). In this work, we consider Type-I
ARQ, which implies that the same packet can be transmitted
up to L times [4].
III. P ROPOSED PACKET R EPAIR AND R ECOVERY
This section presents a brief overview of NOM and explains
the packet correlation that results when nonorthogonal trans-
mission is combined with ARQ, which is the case for NOM.
Packet correlation can be experienced in NOMA, NOM [18]
and generalized NOM (GNOM) [19] systems. However, this
work considers the low complexity NOM in which the number
of combined packets per transmission slot N = 2 ∀` [18].
Without loss of generality, we consider that all packets until
the ith packet transmission are received correctly, and hence,
the transmitted NOM packets during the current transmission
can be expressed as
q q
(1) (1) (1) (1)
si = αi,1 xi,1 + αi+1,1 xi+1,1 (2)
(·) (·)
where αi,1 and αi+1,l are the powers allocated for the primary
(·) (·)
and secondary packet, respectively, αi,1 + αi+1,1 = 1. Since
(·)
the power allocated is fixed for a given configuration, αi,1 will
(·)
be referred to as α and αi+1,l = 1 − α. The first subscript in
the transmitted packets indicates the packet sequence number,
and the superscript indicates the transmission counter of the
primary packet, which indicates when a packet should be
dropped. The second subscript represents the total number
of transmissions of a packet as primary or secondary. The
received composite NOM packet can be expressed as,
(`) (`) (`)
yi,l = hi si + wi (3)
where w is the AWGN vector whose elements are i.i.d., w ∼
2
CN (0, σw I), where I is a K × K identity matrix, K is the
packet length. If binary phase shift keying (BPSK) is adopted,
then K = B.
Since NOM is generally coupled with ARQ, then the
(`)
detection process for yi,l depends on the value of `, and
generally follows the conventional detection used in NOMA
systems where the packet with high power is detected first
while considering the low power packet as unknown noise.
For ` = 1,n the oprimary packet is transmitted only once, i.e.,
(1)
x̂i = D1 yi,l . The secondary packet xi+1 is detected by
applying successive interference cancellation (SIC) and then
MLD of the resultant sequence,
 
q
(1) (1) (1)
x̂i+1 = D1 yi,l − hi αi,l x̂i . (4)
For notational simplicity, the three operations required to
detect xi and xi+1 , i.e., MLD of xi , SIC, and MLD of xi+1
will be denoted as
n o
(1)
{x̂i , x̂i+1 } = D2 yi,l . (5)
(`)
Due to ARQ, the received sequences yi,l might be fully or
partially correlated. Fig. 2 shows an example where x1 and x2
are multiplexed and transmitted during the first transmission
slot. However, both fail the CRC process and hence are
retransmitted. As shown in the figure, the CRC for x1 fails
again, and thus x1 is dropped because L = 2 in this example.
(1) (2)
In this context, we consider that y1,1 and y1,2 are fully
correlated because they contain the same data packets. After
dropping x1 , x2 is considered as the primary packet, and hence
(2)
it is multiplexed with x3 , and then transmitted. Therefore, y1,2
(1)
and y2,3 are partially correlated because they have only one
4

(1) (2)
packet in common, which is x2 . Similarly, y2,3 and y2,4 are x̂2 6= x2 , the receiver sends a NACK to the transmitter asking
(2) (1) for retransmission of s2
fully correlated while y2,4 and y3,3 are partially correlated.
TS 4: The transmitted sends s2 for the second time which is
(2) (1) (2)
received as y2,4 . Therefore, y2,3 and y2,4 are fully correlated
B. Proposed PRR Technique and can be combined as described in (6) to produce d2 . Given
As can be noted from Fig. 2, packets x3 and x4 were suc- that the detector fails to detect x2 correctly, the receiver sends
cessfully detected in the 5th transmission slot, while packets a NACK to the transmitter to drop x2 . Moreover, the sequences
(1) (2)
x1 and x2 were dropped because they exceeded the maximum y2,3 and y2,4 and the corresponding channels information are
number of allowed transmissions. However, it can be noted stored in the drop buffer A.
(1) (1) (1)
from the figure that y3,3 is partially correlated with y2,3 and TS 5: The transmitter sends s3 which is received as y3,3 .
(2) (1)
y2,4 where x3 is a common packet between the two received Because y3,3 is partially correlated with all buffered se-
(1)
sequences. Therefore, the interference caused by x3 to y2,3 quences, then it cannot be combined with any other sequence,
(2) and hence, it is applied directly to the detector. Given that
and y2,4 can be eliminated using a simple SIC process. It is
worth noting that the SIC in this case is different from the packets x3 is detected correctly, then SIC can be applied to
conventional SIC used in NOMA because in this scenario we extract x4 . In such scenarios, the partial correlation between
(1) (2)
eliminate the weak rather than the strong interference. Once y2,3 , y2,4 and x3 can be exploited to apply the PRR process,
(1) (2) which can be described as
the interference is eliminated, the sequences y2,3 and y2,4 will
be interference-free, and hence, they can be combined and 1) Because x3 is considered as interference with respect to
(1) (2)
detected, and the probability of successful detection will be y2,3 and y2,4 , its detrimental effect can be eliminated as,
much higher than the initial detection process in the presence q
of interference. Given that x2 is successfully recovered, the (1) (1) (1) (1)
ỹ2,3 = y2,3 − α2,3 h2 x̂3 (7)
same process can be applied to cancel the interference from
(1) (2) q
y1,1 and y1,2 , and then attempt to re-detect x1 . (2) (2) (2) (2)
ỹ2,4 = y2,4 − α2,4 h2 x̂3 . (8)
The detailed processes of the PRR algorithm for the exam-
ple in Fig. 2 is depicted in Table I. The processing performed The interference cancellation (IC) in this case is de-
at each transmission session is as follows: noted as retroactive IC (RIC) because the cancellation is
(1)
TS 1: The transmitter sends s1 , which is received as y1,1 performed between symbols from different transmission
as defined in (3). Assuming that the primary packet x1 is slots. The signal to interference plus noise ratios (SINRs)
(1) (2) (1)
detected erroneously as indicated by the CRC process, then of ỹ2,3 and ỹ2,4 is expected to be better than y2,3 and
the detection process for packet x2 is not initiated, and a (2)
y2,4 due to the IC.
retransmission is requested using a NACK {0, 0}. n
(1)
o
(2)
2) Compute d̃2 = C ỹ2,3 , ỹ2,4 as described in (6). Then
TS 2: The transmitter resends s1 for the second time. The
(2)
received sequence in this case is denoted as y1,2 . In this apply d̃2 to the detector to generate x̂2 . If x̂2 = x2 , the
(1) (2)
case, the received sequences y1,1 and y1,2 are fully correlated same process is repeated by applying the RIC to eliminate
(1) (2)
and hence CC can be used to combine both sequences. The the effect of x2 from y1,1 and y1,2 , and then detect x1 .
combining process can be described as, If x̂2 6= x2 , then the PRR is terminated, x1 and x2 are
h i∗ h i∗ dropped permanently, and the drop buffer is cleared.
(1) (1) (2) (2)
n o h1 y1,1 + h1 y1,2 3) At this stage, the receiver might have managed to repair
(1) (2)
C y1,1 , y1,2 , d1 = (6) and recover only x2 , x1 and x2 , or neither. In all
 (1) 2  (2) 2
   
h1  + h1  cases, the drop buffer will be cleared because the next
where [·]∗ denotes the complex conjugate operator. The se-
quence d1 is then passed to the detector to recover packet x1 ,
which gives the detected packet x̂1 . Given that x̂1 6= x1 , then
the receiver sends a NACK to the transmitter to drop x1 since
it has reached the maximum number of transmissions allowed.
Moreover, the receiver discards x̂1 and stores the associated
(1) (2)
received sequences y1,1 and y1,2 , and the corresponding
(1) (2)
channel coefficients h1 and h1 in the drop buffer A. It
is worth noting that (6) is equivalent to an MRC process at
the packet level, and hence, it is straightforward to extend for
arbitrary number of users.
TS 3: The transmitter drops x1 and generates s2 by mul-
tiplexing packets x2 and x3 . The received sequence in this
(1) (1)
case is denoted as y2,3 . Because y2,3 is partially correlated
(1) (2) (1)
with y1,1 and y1,2 , CC cannot be applied and y2,3 will be
directly applied to the detector to generate x̂2 . Assuming that
transmitted packets will be independent of the buffered
sequences. Consequently, the drop buffer will be cleared.
TS 6: At this stage, the transmitter should send two new
packets which are x5 , x6 .
Because NOM [18] limits the packet multiplexing to two
packets, then generalizing the considered example implies that
L is the only factor that should be considered. Consequently,
x1 can be transmitted L times as the primary packet, CC
can be applied up to L − 1 times. For each primary packet,
the drop buffer may save a maximum of L copies, which
(1) (2) (L)
are yi,1 , yi,2 , . . . , yi,L . In the case that the transmitter has
M packets to send, then in the worst case scenario the
receiver might need to buffer LM −1 sequences, and the PRR
algorithm will operate offline and backward until all packets
are recovered, or the partial correlation link is broken when a
particular packet is permanently dropped. Algorithm 1 presents
the generalized PRR for L ≥ 2.
 5

Fig. 2: Packet correlation in NOM where L = 2.

TABLE I: Example of PRR for L = 2 and M = 4.

(`)
TS yi,l Process Output CRC Drop buffer
n o
(1) (1) (1) (1)
1 y1,1 D2 y1,1 x̂1 , x̂2 0, 0 y1,1 , h1
n o
(2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2)
2 y1,2 1) d1 = C y1,1 , y1,2 , 2) D2 {d1 } x̂1 , x̂2 0, 0 y1,1 , y1,2 , h1 , h1
n o
(1) (1) (1) (2) (1) (1) (2) (1)
3 y2,3 D2 y2,3 x̂2 , x̂3 0, 0 y1,1 , y1,2 , y2,3 , h1 , h1 , h2
n o
(2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2)
4 y2,4 1) d2 = C y2,3 , y2,4 , 2) D2 {d2 } x̂2 , x̂3 0, 0 y1,1 , y1,2 , y2,3 , y2,4 , h1 , h1 , h2 , h2
n o
(1) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2)
1) D2 y3,3 x̂3 , x̂4 1, 1 y1,1 , y1,2 , y2,3 , y2,4 , h1 , h1 , h2 , h2
n o n o
(1) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2)
5 y3,3 2) ỹ2,3 , ỹ2,4 , 3) d̃2 = C ỹ2,3 , ỹ2,4 , 4) D1 d̃2 x̂2 1 y1,1 , y1,2 , h1 , h1
n o n o
(1) (2) (1) (2)
5) ỹ1,1 , ỹ1,2 , 6) d̃1 = C ỹ1,1 , ỹ1,2 , 7) D1 d̃1 x̂1 1 −

Algorithm 1: Packet repair and recovery when a packet loss occurs and the receiver is unable to recover
1 Input:
(`)
yi,l ,
(`)
hi %the received sequence and channel
a certain packet, the receiver employs error concealment to
2 Output: X, %the set of recovered packets x̂ minimize artifacts caused by the missing packet in the received
3 X=∅ n o image.
(1) (`)
4 d1 = C yi,l−(`−1) , ..., yi,l Enhancing the image quality at the receiver, for example,
5 {x̂i , x̂i+1 } = D2 {d1 } can be achieved using a zero or white insertion mechanism, in
6 if x̂i fails CRC then
(`) (`) which missing packets in the received image are replaced with
7 buffer yi,l , hi
all-zero or all-white packets, respectively, for dark and bright
8 return
9 end input images. The image received following zero or white-
10 if x̂i+1 fails CRC then insertion is referred to as a concealed image. Later, a moving
11 X = X ∪ {x̂i } average filter (MAF) is applied to the concealed images in
12 else
13 X = X ∪ {x̂i , x̂i+1 } order to reconstruct the missing packets, thus improving the
14 end visual quality in terms of PSNR. Initially, all sides of the
15 while drop buffer is not empty do received images are padded with additional W pixels, where
16 extract the L received sequences from the drop buffer
(1) (L)
yi−1,j−(L−1) , ..., yi−1,j for some j
W is the size of the window in the MAF. Padding techniques
(1) (L) include replicating the boundary pixels, padding all zeros or all
17 use RIC to estimate ỹi−1,j−(L−1) , ..., ỹi−1,j as in (7) and (8)
n
(1) (L)
o white pixels, or extrapolating the boundary pixels. We replicate
18 d̃2 = C ỹi−1,l−(L−1) , ..., ỹi−1,l
n o the border pixels in this work. The window is then applied
19 x̂i−1 = D1 d̃2 to pixels with intensities less than a predefined threshold,
20 if x̂i−1 fails CRC then and the considered pixels are replaced with the mean of the
21 empty the drop buffer
22 return pixels in the window. If zero-insertion is used on the receiving
23 else image, the pre-defined threshold is usually 0. The window
24 X = X ∪ {x̂i−1 } size is critical, as a larger window size causes image blurring,
25 i=i−1
26 end whereas a small window produces visible edges. Due to higher
27 end packet loss at low SNR region, a bigger window is used to
minimize artifacts caused by zero or white-insertion and to
produce a smoother output image. A small window is used to
IV. U SE C ASE : I MAGE T RANSMISSION conceal images received under good SNR conditions.
The most often used metric for assessing the quality of re-
As an application of the proposed PRR scheme, we consider
constructed images is the PSNR, which is typically reported in
the case of image transmission of monitoring cameras in ITS
decibels. The PSNR determines the visual difference between
systems, which is a widely used application [30]–[34]. Such
two images A and B, and it is defined as
applications can tolerate some delay, which can be up to
several seconds. Moreover, some of the images can be stored
 
Max{A}
for future reuse. In conventional image transmission systems, PSNR{A, B} = 10 log10 (9)
MSE {A, B}
6

10 0 10 0

10 -1 10 -1
Packet drop rate

Packet drop rate

10 -2 10 -2

10 -3 10 -3

10 -4 10 -4
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR (dB) SNR (dB)

10 0
10 0

10 -1
10 -1
Packet drop rate

Packet drop rate

10 -2
10 -2

10 -3
10 -3

10 -4
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 10 -4
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR (dB)
SNR (dB)

Fig. 3: Packet drop rate for different L and α values, with and without PRR.

where Max{A} is the transmitted gray image’s maximum
pixel intensity, which is 255 for images with 8 bits per pixel,
and the mean squared error (MSE) for an m × n pixel image
is given by,
m−1 n−1
1 XX 2 is used only with the visualized images. The Monte Carlo
MSE {A, B} = [A(i, j) − B(i, j)] .
mn i=0 j=0
V. N UMERICAL R ESULTS
The section presents the performance evaluation of the pro-
posed PRR scheme in terms of packet drop rate (PDR), PSNR,
number of recovered packets, buffer occupancy, and visualized
images. The results are obtained for SNR values that range
from 0 to 35 dB, maximum allowable transmissions per packet
L ∈ {1, 2, 3}, and power coefficient α ∈ {0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9}.
The channel is modeled as a block Rayleigh fading and the
information bits are modulated using BPSK. The adopted error
concealment scheme to reduce the impact of the dropped pack-
ets is based on zero-insertion and MAF. The error concealment
(10)
simulation are generated using 216 = 65, 536 packets each
of which has 128 bits. In the proposed PRR, a packet is
considered dropped if it fails the CRC after being transmitted
as a primary packet for L transmissions and the PRR technique
fails to recover it.
Fig. 3 compares the system PDR with and without PRR
using various values of α and L. As can be noted from the
figure, the PDR improves significantly for all values of α and
L. For example, with α = 0.6 and L = 3, the PDR improves
 7

50 50

45 45

40 40

35 35
PSNR (dB)

PSNR (dB)
30 30

25 25

20 20

15 15

10 10

5 5
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR (dB) SNR (dB)

50 50

45 45

40 40

35 35
PSNR (dB)

PSNR (dB)

30 30

25 25

20 20

15 15

10 10

5 5
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR (dB) SNR (dB)

Fig. 4: PSNR between the received images and the transmitted image, with and without PRR.

by about 15 dB at PDR of 10−4 . For the case of α = 0.8,
which is the near-optimum power allocation to maximize the
throughput [18], the improvement is about 6 dB. The PDR
improvement variation due to varying L is generally small
where roughly the same improvement is achieved for all the
considered values of L. It can be also noted that the efficiency
of the proposed PRR is more significant at low values of
α, which is due to the fact that the interference from the
secondary packets is more severe in such scenarios. Therefore,
applying the RIC would cause significant SINR improvement.
Fig. 4 is generated using the same parameters used to
generate Fig. 3, however it presents the PSNR. As can be
noted from the figure, the PSNR at low SNRs for α = 0.6 is
low and almost fixed, which implies that most of the packets
are dropped, regardless the value of L. Nevertheless, the PSNR
increases sharply for SNR > 8 dB and L = 3. Comparing the
PSNR with and without PRR shows about 12 dB improvement
at PSNR = 40 dB. Increasing the value of α reduces the
impact of interference from the secondary packets, and thus
the impact of the PRR becomes less significant as compared
to the high interference cases, as in the case of α = 0.9. For
the near-optimum power allocation of α = 0.8, a significant
gain of about 5 dB can still be achieved.
Fig. 5 shows the actual number of packets that were repaired
and recovered after exceeding the maximum number of permit-
ted transmissions, and being dropped by the transmitter. The
presented results in the figure were obtained by considering
that the total number of packet to be transmitted M = 16, 384
packets, and the results are averaged over four realizations.
As can be noted from the figure, the proposed PRR approach
8

600
12000

500
10000
No. of recovered packets

Buffer Occupancy
400 40
8000
30
300
6000
20

4000 200 10

0
2000 100 6 8 10 12

0
0 10 20 30 0 10 20 30 0 10 20 30 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
SNR (dB)
SNR (dB)
Fig. 5: Successfully recovered packets after PRR. Fig. 7: Average and maximum drop buffer occupancy for α =
0.9.
5000

4500
most packets will be dropped, and hence, the RIC process
4000
will not be applied, and most initially dropped packet will be
3500 permanently dropped. At high SNRs, the number of dropped
Buffer Occupancy

3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0 the PRR average delay. As can be noted from Fig. 6, the
0 2
Fig. 6: Average and maximum drop buffer occupancy for α =
0.8.
can effectively repair and recover a significant portion of the
dropped of packets, particularly for low values of α and high
L values. For example, the PRR scheme managed to recover
about 12, 000 packets at SNR = 12 dB, α = 0.6, and
L = 3. Given that the PDR for the considered scenario is
about 0.9, it implies that the proposed PRR scheme managed
to recover about 80% of the dropped packets. Decreasing the
value of L increases the probability that certain packets will
be permanently dropped due the loss of correlation at multiple
positions in the buffered sequences. Increasing the value of
α reduces the interference caused by the secondary packets,
and thus, a smaller number of packets can be recovered. For
example, for α = 0.7 and L = 3, the maximum number
of packets that was recovered is about 7, 500 at SNR of
10 dB. By considering that P DR = 0.7 at the considered
SNR, then the PRR managed to recover about 65% of the
dropped packet, which is a tangible ratio. At very low SNRs,
100 packets is small, and thus, most initially dropped packets can
80
be recovered using the PRR. Therefore, the recovery ratio may
increase to 100%.
60
Figs. 6 and 7 show the buffering requirements of the
40 proposed PRR for α = 0.8 and 0.9, respectively, and for
L = [1, 2, 3]. The figures show the maximum and average
20
buffer occupancy. the maximum buffer occupancy can be used
0
6 8 10 12 as an indicator for the drop buffer capacity requirements,
and the average buffer occupancy can be used to indicate
4 6 8 10 12 buffer occupancy at SNR = 0 dB and L = 1 is about
SNR (dB) 4, 500 packets, which is quite large. Nevertheless, no reliable
communications can be performed at such low SNRs, and we
usually have L > 1. Therefore, the design can consider the
case of SNR ≥ 2 dB and L = 3, which implies that the
buffer size should be about 500 packets. Unlike the maximum
occupancy, the average is generally much smaller and it can
be less than 100 packets for L = 3. The same trends can be
also observed in Fig. 7. However, the buffering requirements
and delay are much smaller because the primary packet has
high power and the interference is weaker. In such cases, the
receiver can either recover or permanently drop the buffered
packets. Overall, although the delay is relatively high at low
SNRs, practical communications systems requires SNR  0
dB to offer reliable performance. Moreover, the proposed PRR
is proposed for delay tolerant applications. Therefore, the
system should be able to tolerate such delays.
Figs. 8 and 9 are used to evaluate the visual impact of
the PRR. The images are presented for α = 0.8 and 0.9,
respectively, and for L = 2. In each figure four different
scenarios are considered: a) The image is presented without
error concealment nor PRR, b) The image is improved using
only PRR, c) Only error concealment is used, and in d) both

(a) Received image without post processing.
(c) Received image with error concealment.
Fig. 8: Received image with and without post processing using SNR = 10 dB, α = 0.8, and L = 2.
error concealment and PRR are used. By comparing Fig. 8a
and Fig. 8b, it can be noted that significant improvement was
achieved for the case of PRR. Comparing Fig. 8a and Fig. 8c
shows that the error concealment has improved the received
image, however the improvement is limited due to the large
number of dropped packets. Interestingly, Fig. 8d shows that
the received image quality has improved substantially when
both techniques are applied. In the first stage, the PRR repairs
and recovers large number of packets, which enables the error
concealment to operate effectively. The same observations
apply to Fig. 9. However, at SNR = 12 dB the received image
was recovered nearly without any noticeable distortion.
9
(b) Received image with PRR.
(d) Received image with PRR and error concealment.
VI. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
In this work, we proposed and investigated a novel method
for reliable data transmission for NOM-based communications
systems. The proposed PRR technique is generally designed
for delay-tolerant systems. The main concept of the PRR
scheme is to exploit the correlation among the received se-
quences to repair and recover the packets that were dropped by
the transmitter and initially discarded by the receiver because
they failed the detection process. Consequently, the reliability
of the received data can be significantly improved without
any additional spectrum utilization or power consumption. The
system performance was evaluated in terms of PDR, PSNR,
10
(a) Received image without post processing.
(c) Received image with error concealment.
Fig. 9: Received image with and without post processing for SNR = 12 dB, α = 0.8 and L = 2.
buffer occupancy, number of recovered packets, and visualized
image quality. The obtained results show that the proposed
scheme managed to recover 100% of the dropped packets,
and the PDR was improved by 15 dB in certain scenarios.
Although the proposed PRR was applied to the NOM
scheme in this work, our future work will focus on extending
the PRR to the GNOM. In the GNOM, the number of multi-
plexed packets in each transmission is much larger than two,
and it is time-varying. Therefore, the PRR should be designed
to accommodate various correlation patterns. Moreover, the
length of the correlated received sequences is expected to
be higher than the case of NOM, and thus the buffering
requirements should be evaluated to avoid buffer overflow.
(b) Received image with PRR.
(d) Received image with PRR and error concealment.
The PRR can be also applied to conventional NOMA systems.
However, the sequence correlation in such cases depends
on the ACK/NACK produced by all users as well as the
receiver that will apply the PRR. Therefore, although the PRR
is generally applicable to GNOM and NOMA systems, the
design has to be modified to accommodate the highlighted
differences, which requires dedicated work.
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