Subj : Re: error corrcting software + location on pc
To   : comp.programming
From : mwojcik
Date : Thu Sep 08 2005 09:43 pm


In article <Xns96CA76F3B5AB7dtiktinnospambogusco@216.196.97.142>, David Tiktin <dtiktin@nospam.totally-bogus.com> writes:
> On 06 Sep 2005, mwojcik@newsguy.com (Michael Wojcik) wrote:
> 
> > That made me wonder if there were any prominent examples of ECC
> > network protocols.
> 
> ATM (that's Asynchronous Tranfer Mode) networks use forward error 
> correction for at least some types of traffic classes.

Thanks for the tip.  That led me to several references, such as a
description of the US Defense Information System Network (DISN),
which notes that forward error correction should be used in ATM links
of certain types, such as satellite.  That makes sense - BEC (ie, ACK
and retransmit) requires back-and-forth exchanges, so it suffers much
more from high latency.  For a high-latency link, the bandwidth
penalty of FEC may be less than the latency penalty of BEC.

(I also discovered that the abbreviation "FEC" is also used in the ATM
world for "Forwarding Equivalence Class", which gave me a number of
false hits on my search...)

-- 
Michael Wojcik                  michael.wojcik@microfocus.com

Unlikely prediction o' the day:
Eventually, every programmer will have to write a Java or distributed
object program.
   -- Orfali and Harkey, _Client / Server Programming with Java and CORBA_

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