March 11 Seminar Coded TCP

Doug Leith

Hamilton Institute

Abstract:

This talk discusses the use of error correction coding at the transport layer. A key advantage of adopting a transport layer over a link layer approach is that it provides backward compatibility with existing equipment already installed in networks – an important consideration in light of the estimated >1 billion wireless devices currently deployed – and can be rolled out immediately. And a number of interesting and unusual technical challenges are raised. Coding here has a fundamentally different aim from conventional designs, namely to reduce delay rather than increase throughput. Congestion control also faces real challenges as packet loss may be due to both queue overflow and channel loss and so need not indicate congestion.

The need is for congestion control that achieves high throughput while being fair, robust, backward compatible etc. As well as discussing basic theoretical questions raised by these design issues, the talk will also describe recent experience with developing practical implementations of transport layer coding.

BIO:

Prof. Doug Leith is Director of the Hamilton Institute (http://www.hamilton.ie/) at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, an applied mathematics research institute focusing on communication networks. Doug’s research interests include network congestion control, coding/information theory, optimisation and resource allocation in wireless networks.