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Nonlinear Neural Nets Smooth Wi-Fi Packets

Posted by timothy on from the for-the-occasional-always dept.

mindless4210 writes "Smart Packets, Inc has developed the Smart WiFi Algorithm, a packet sizing technology which can predict the near future of network conditions based on the recent past. The development was originally started to enable smooth real-time data delivery for applications such as streaming video, but when tested on 802.11b networks it was shown to increase data throughput by 100%. The technology can be applied at the application level, the operating system level, or at the firmware level."

4 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Re:could be handy.. by wpmegee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not necessarily. This improves throughput, but as a general rule wireless always adds 20ms to your ping. so 50% of that would still be a 10ms penalty.

    I'm not a network engineer, but latency is more important than bandwidth for ping times and such.

    For an example pay a half-life game, open the console and type net_graph 3. That'll show you your fps, ping, and in/out bandwith used.

  2. Why Neural Networks? by women · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm curious as to why they are using Neural Networks for this application? In the last 10 years or so, most machine learning applications have moved away from Neural Networks to more mathematically based models such as Support Vector Machines, a generative model (e.g. Naive Bayes), or some kind of Ensemble Method (e.g. Boosting). I suspect they used NN because the Matlab toolkit made it easy or someone in research hasn't kept up. I'd look for a paper to come out soon that improves the accuracy by using SVM.

    --
    If you're a fan of women, add me to your friends list.
  3. Skeptic by giampy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Very often the term "neural network" is used
    just as a selling point because it sounds
    like something extremely advanced and "related
    to artificial intelligence".

    usually the neural network is just a
    very simple, possibly linear, adaptive filter
    which means that really contains no more
    than a few matrix multiplications ...

    yes it has some success in approximating
    things locally, but terms like "learning"
    are really misused

    After RTFA (the second) it actually
    seems that they did try two or three
    things before, but really i wouldn't
    "welcome our new intelligent packet sizers overlords"
    just yet.

    --
    We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
  4. Why wireless only by Old+Wolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why isn't there something like this for normal internet? Even the "old days" of Zmodem's big packets if it was going well, and small packets if it wasn't, is better than the fixed MTU/MRU we're stuck with now.