The potential for huge wireless network throughput improvements
based on work done at MIT and other universities is being met
with a mix of awe and harsh skepticism. Face it, when someone
says they can boost throughput on a given network from 1Mbit/s
to 16Mbit/s you'll take notice. When they tell me and others in
the Northeast that people can really stream movies on the Amtrak
Acela train between New York and Boston -- where simply getting
email is tricky -- I really take notice. The only question is,
as the commercials used to say, whether it's real or it's
Memorex. Basically, the gains come from utilizing coded TCP to
attack the problem of dropped packets due to network delays or
congestion. It is described in a paper written by researchers
from MIT and University of Porto in Portugal, and drawing on
work done at those schools, as well as Harvard University,
Caltech, and Technical University of Munich. The work focuses on
the little lost packets of wireless networks, which may account
for 2 percent, 3 perce