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Increasing Wireless Network Speed By 1000% By Replacing Packets With Algebra
MrSeb writes "A team of researchers from MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and other universities in Europe, have devised a way of boosting the performance of wireless networks by up to 10 times — without increasing transmission power, adding more base stations, or using more wireless spectrum. The researchers' creation, coded TCP, is a novel way of transmitting data so that lost packets don't result in higher latency or re-sent data. With coded TCP, blocks of packets are clumped together and then transformed into algebraic equations (PDF) that describe the packets. If part of the message is lost, the receiver can solve the equation to derive the missing data. The process of solving the equations is simple and linear, meaning it doesn't require much processing on behalf of the router/smartphone/laptop. In testing, the coded TCP resulted in some dramatic improvements. MIT found that campus WiFi (2% packet loss) jumped from 1Mbps to 16Mbps. On a fast-moving train (5% packet loss), the connection speed jumped from 0.5Mbps to 13.5Mbps. Moving forward, coded TCP is expected to have huge repercussions on the performance of LTE and WiFi networks — and the technology has already been commercially licensed to several hardware makers."
...I don't see how it will solve "spectrum crunch" when every nibble of your LTE bandwidth is oversubscribed by 5 to 1. Whether you have 32 users doing 10 Mbps streams, or 320 user doing 1 Mbps streams, it's all accounted for. I'd certainly like to be one of the 10, but 20 Mhz worth of spectrum at 16 symbols/Hertz is not a limitation you can change with fast/excellent forward error correction.
If you've ever used Usenet, and you've used parity files to recover missing segments of data, then you know exactly how this technique works.
Frankly, I'm surprised it took so long for someone to apply it to lossy network environments. It seems obvious in hindsight.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I agree that it's not a magic bullet. The point is, however, that the overall throughput of the network was increased by better usage of the available resources! If the *effective* available bandwidth is increased, then the performance of everyone "nibbling" on that network will *also* presumably increase. Also, think how much more money carriers may be able to squeeze out of users without needing to invest more in infrastructure! [/sarcasm]
Think of it as bitmap vs vector graphic.
I drank what? -- Socrates