We try to mix it up when we choose subjects for the 4cast, but here we are talking again about a topic we featured just 2 weeks ago. At that time, we thought the promises of “5G” wireless were pretty significant, but since then some major universities have released news that could really boost wireless networks, although details are currently sparse due to nondisclosure agreements. Researchers from these American and European universities claim that they can increase wireless bandwidth tremendously with no need to replace equipment; they do it by handling the problem of dropped data packets in a new way.
- Network coding speeds up wireless by 1000% (i-programmer/Mike James) “TCP [Transmission Control Protocol] isn’t a good protocol for an unreliable channel. It sends packets one at a time and relies on the receiver to acknowledge them. If any packets go missing then the receiver signals this and the transmitter sends the packet again. Over wired connections this works reasonably well because few packets are lost and the problem is usually network congestion for which slowing things down tends to help. However, over wireless networks, especially phone networks, packet loss is common. What happens in this case is that the network capacity is wasted in resending packets and in the handshaking needed to request a resend.”
- Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra (ExtremeTech/Sebastian Anthony) “With coded TCP, blocks of packets are clumped together and then transformed into algebraic equations 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.”
- A bandwidth breakthrough (MIT Technology Review/David Talbot) “Testing the system on Wi-Fi networks at MIT, where 2 percent of packets are typically lost, Medard’s group found that a normal bandwidth of one megabit per second was boosted to 16 megabits per second. In a circumstance where losses were 5 percent—common on a fast-moving train—the method boosted bandwidth from 0.5 megabits per second to 13.5 megabits per second.”
- A bit of algebra makes Wi-Fi go much faster (Geekosystem/James Plafke) “There’s no timetable for this technology to be gifted to the Wi-Fi world, but an estimate of two or three years was bandied about. At the rate Internet speeds are climbing nowadays, though, who knows where our standard speed will be by then, and who knows how much this technology will be able to boost that.”
Packet fact:
TCP packets vary in size depending on the type of data they are transmitting, but the most common sizes for Internet TCP packets range from about 400 to 600 bytes. So it would take about 100 average-size packets to transmit the typical oplin.org/4cast web page (around 57,000 bytes).
