I was looking for details but the article was just generalities for public consumption. Big fan of various codes including RS, golay, and convolutional, having implimented/used them in some of my homebrew projects.
heheh there just went 45 minutes of guilty pleasure see Modeling Network Coded TCP.
I think this quote cuts through the hype:
” In a situation with zero losses, there was little if any benefit, but loss-free wireless scenarios are rare.”
loss-free scenarios are not rare, They are entirely predictable, and they just require higher signal strength
Error correction codes are already part of the data link layer.
What they imply (order of magnitude increase) is a violation of Nyquist’s Law.
What they are doing will not solve plain old congestion problems.
I suspect that they are using normal packet transmission overhead in a different way that includes error correction elements. I could see some level of improvement possible - mainly by managing flow-control differently.
Here is the fundamental theory issue: Typical Digital Networks perform consistently and then “fall off a brick wall”. If you can stave off the brick wall with a bit of low-overhead error-correction, you might be able to measure a significant increase in performance (10x even) at the signal ‘brick wall’.
This may increase cell coverage for a specific link scenario (fringe) a little bit, but will not increase designed capacity or any other meaningful measure of a well-designed network - per their quote at the beginning of this post.