Coded TCP

Increasing wireless network speed by 1000%, by replacing packets with algebra

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. This is expected to have huge repercussions on the performance of LTE and WiFi networks.

In essence, the innovation — called coded TCP — makes packet loss completely disappear.

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.

And that, children, is why math is cool. Well, at least until you reach your own personal level of Insurmountable Mathematical Suckitude (which was Stat for me). The coolness factor drops off rather rapidly at that point, since everything after that involves sitting in a classroom and staring at a blackboard covered with incomprehensible chicken scratchings while listening to strange mouth noises. It's hard to look like anything higher up the evolutionary ladder than a slightly retarded puppy under such circumstances.

Fortunately for we retarded puppies, the people at places like MIT were just catching their second wind in Stat. That allows them to go onward, upward, and do greater things -- like increasing by three orders of magnitude the speed at which the average subway commuter can stream pr0n to his smartphone. Progress, it is here.