[ih] Multicast

[Lawrence Stewart]

One interesting developments from the 0’s include Network Coding.

Background, not authoritative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_network_coding

The basic idea is to have intermediate nodes in the network retransmit linear combinations of the packets they receive. Receive nodes untangle the mess by solving the resulting matrix equations.

It can achieve better throughput than the sum of individual flows.

This is also related to “rateless” error correcting codes, in which you transmit pseudorandom linear combinatios of the packets of a message until the receiver gets enough of them to make the whole collection solveable.  This has been used for real systems, such as Microsoft’s commuter vans, with flakey cellular backhaul. (Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_code)

Of course this stuff depends on a lot of compute power, that was not available back when.

-Larry