Skip to content

Comment on Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebraparent

Comments

>Instead of sending each packet immediately, don't you need to accumulate n packets to encode as a group?

The way coding works is that you divide data in to n data packets and then calculate c coding packets, and then you can lose any c out of (n+c) packets and still reconstruct the data. You need to see all the data packets in a group before you can finish calculating any of the coding packets, but nothing stops you from sending the data packets immediately.

On the other hand, non-hardware-based error correction that allows for recovery from a large amount of data loss is relatively processor intensive, and the processors in a lot of network equipment are very slow. So you can easily see an increase in latency, not because the packets take longer to send, but because the processor in the network equipment is too busy calculating error correction to timely forward your packets.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.