Strictly speaking you cannot compress data by expressing the data as a solution a to system of linear equations, but if you are willing to make the system under-determined (too few equations and too many variables) you can compress data. All it looks like is going on is that they are compressing and storing the current packet's worth of data this way as well as half of each adjacent packet's worth. This is slightly less then double the original size because we are compressing the data. This way if we loose a packet we can re-construct it using the data from the adjacent packets.
It works out to be a reliability to memory usage/processing time trade off. For wireless sensor networks (the specialty of one of the labs at my college where I ran across this technique) it is a really good idea. If you lose more then 1 packet then there is not any gain, so any situation where packet loss is bursty and tends to last more then 1 packet then this will not be of any use, so it's application to wifi and cellular are iffy.
Comments
This is not really a new idea, based on the info from the article we can inference what they are doing.
here is a paper on the principle at work: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165168405...
Strictly speaking you cannot compress data by expressing the data as a solution a to system of linear equations, but if you are willing to make the system under-determined (too few equations and too many variables) you can compress data. All it looks like is going on is that they are compressing and storing the current packet's worth of data this way as well as half of each adjacent packet's worth. This is slightly less then double the original size because we are compressing the data. This way if we loose a packet we can re-construct it using the data from the adjacent packets.
It works out to be a reliability to memory usage/processing time trade off. For wireless sensor networks (the specialty of one of the labs at my college where I ran across this technique) it is a really good idea. If you lose more then 1 packet then there is not any gain, so any situation where packet loss is bursty and tends to last more then 1 packet then this will not be of any use, so it's application to wifi and cellular are iffy.