A method, apparatus and computer program product for providing partial packet recovery (PPR) for wireless networks is presented. PPR incorporates an expanded physical layer (PHY) interface that provides PHY-independent hints to higher layers about the PHY's confidence in each bit it decodes, and a technique to recover data even when a packet preamble is corrupted and not decodable at the receiver. Also described is an asynchronous link-layer automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol built on PPR that allows a receiver to compactly encode a request for retransmission of only those bits in a packet that are likely in error.