Network coding
Posted by Tim Stevens on 21 May 2008
Faster Wireless Networks: sending descriptions of data could be more efficient than sending the data itself, by Duncan Graham-Rowe at MIT Technology Review:
The role of computer networks would appear to be fairly straightforward: to ferry data from one point to another. But a novel wireless-network protocol developed for the U.S. military breaks with this tradition by sending not the data itself but rather a description of the data. In simulations, a network using the protocol was five times more efficient than a traditional network. Within the next year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will test the protocol in field trials at Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia.
The protocol is part of a project to create a new generation of mobile ad-hoc networks - self-configuring networks of mobile wireless nodes - that will enable faster and more reliable tactical communications between military personnel and vehicles, says Greg Lauer, section head for advanced network systems at BAE Systems in Burlington, MA, which helped develop the protocol for DARPA.
But the project also demonstrates the potential of a new and exciting field called network coding, says Muriel Médard, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who collaborated on the project with BAE Systems.
Read the rest of this fascinating article here.
