Ugh, remember when academia helped create the internet by releasing free publicly available unlicensed RFCs?
Edit: Not RFPs, duh
Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Help me out: Surely FEC over wireless can't be new. Why is this worth writing about?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction#Low-de... implies that they are used in 802.11n (i have no idea what is new in this article)
I was thinking the exact same thing. Oh look, someone had discovered forward error correction.
Now if they can compute a series of code blocks over a rolling set of data blocks, that would be new. It would be like singing a round of "Row Row Row your Boat" but in data packets, just waiting and you'll be able to figure out the packets that were dropped. Anyone know if this is what they did?
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#13Ugh, remember when academia helped create the internet by releasing free publicly available unlicensed RFCs? Edit: Not RFPs, duh
You mean RFCs :)
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#14Isn't the downside of FEC encoded packets increased latency? Instead of sending each packet immediately, don't you need to accumulate n packets to encode as a group? Or does the math allow incremental encoding? Simple parity is incremental, but the FEC on DSL lines always added 40ms of latency.
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#15Ugh, remember when academia helped create the internet by releasing free publicly available unlicensed RFCs? Edit: Not RFPs, duh
That was before universities were properly resourced.
Universities desperately need to commercialise their research in order to survive.
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#16Summary: TCP throughput drops dramatically when packet loss is present. This technique uses forward error correction to compensate for packet loss, resulting in higher effective throughput over lossy links. Many WiFi and cellular connections are lossy, so this would be helpful in those cases. They haven't improved the underlying link rate at all. In fact, the FEC overhead is going to reduce the effective link rate. H…
So, "benchmarks very favorable in mostly artificial scenario".
I don't know what the Wi-Fi is like at your home or business, but packet loss is actually really common on my University's wireless network. I wouldn't call this scenario artificial at all.
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#17Summary: TCP throughput drops dramatically when packet loss is present. This technique uses forward error correction to compensate for packet loss, resulting in higher effective throughput over lossy links. Many WiFi and cellular connections are lossy, so this would be helpful in those cases. They haven't improved the underlying link rate at all. In fact, the FEC overhead is going to reduce the effective link rate. H…
I wonder what's so proprietary about their algorithm. I'd assume it's just Reed–Solomon coding on a UDP tunnel (or, alternatively, modifying TCP to accept partially mangled-packets if FEC is successful).
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#18Ugh, remember when academia helped create the internet by releasing free publicly available unlicensed RFCs? Edit: Not RFPs, duh
I'm not sure I remember how each successive advancement in signaling from 802.3-coax through 10gbE through gigabit wireless was driven by public RFCs.
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#19There's a company in Ottawa implementing a similar idea, but based on carving up packets and then inserting one or more redundant XOR packets (RAID-style). Their name for it is IPQ: http://liveqos.com/products/ipq/
They have a patent on this: http://www.google.com/patents/US20120201147
(Disclosure: I was an intern there in 2009, when it was IPeak Networks.)
Re: Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra
#20Google, don't speculate. The primary source appears to be http://www.mit.edu/~medard/papers2011/Network%20CodingMeets%... and similar papers from the same authors.