The future

[dkrift]

http://www.lightreading.com/document...e=lightreading

'Better' TCP Invented

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RALEIGH, N.C. -- Researchers in North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today’s high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.

The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London.

Dr. Injong Rhee, associate professor of computer science, said BIC can achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems. While this might translate into music downloads in the blink of an eye, the true value of such a super-powered protocol is a real eye-opener.

Rhee and NC State colleagues Dr. Khaled Harfoush, assistant professor of computer science, and Lisong Xu, postdoctoral student, presented a paper on their findings in Hong Kong at Infocom 2004, the 23rd meeting of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society, on Thursday, March 11.

Many national and international computing labs are now involved in large-scale scientific studies of nuclear and high-energy physics, astronomy, geology and meteorology. Typically, Rhee said, “Data are collected at a remote location and need to be shipped to labs where scientists can perform analyses and create high-performance visualizations of the data.” Visualizations might include satellite images or climate models used in weather predictions. Receiving the data and sharing the results can lead to massive congestion of current networks, even on the newest wide-area high-speed networks such as ESNet (Energy Sciences Network), which was created by the U.S. Department of Energy specifically for these types of scientific collaborations.

The problem, Rhee said, is the inherent limitations of regular TCP. “TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller,” he said. “Now we are trying to apply it to networks that have several orders of magnitude more available bandwidth.” Essentially, we’re using an eyedropper to fill a water main. BIC, on the other hand, would open the floodgate.

Along with postdoctoral student Xu, Rhee has been working on developing BIC for the past year, although Rhee said he has been researching network congestion solutions for at least a decade. The key to BIC’s speed is that it uses a binary search approach - a fairly common way to search databases - that allows for rapid detection of maximum network capacities with minimal loss of information. “What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second,” Rhee said. The greatest challenge for the new protocol, he added, was to fill the pipe fast without starving out other protocols. “It’s a tough balance,” he said.

By allowing the rapid transfer of increasingly large packets of information over long distances, the new protocol could boost the efficacy of cutting-edge applications ranging from telemedicine and real-time environmental monitoring to business operations and multi-user gaming. At NC State, researchers could more readily visualize, monitor and control real-time simulations and experiments conducted at remote computing clusters. BIC might even help avoid a national disaster: The recent blackout that affected large areas of the eastern United States and Canada underscored the need to spread data-rich backup systems across hundreds of thousands of miles.

With network speeds doubling roughly annually, Rhee said the performances demonstrated by the new protocol could become commonly available in the next few years, setting a new standard for full utilization of the Internet.

[Throtex]

Saw that.

Al Gore will get right on it and have an implementation ready for us by 2035.

[dkrift]

imagine how easy it would be to transfer movies now. No wonder the recording and movie industry are shaking. They better find a way to make money from it.

[Throtex]

Originally posted by dkrift
imagine how easy it would be to transfer movies now. No wonder the recording and movie industry are shaking. They better find a way to make money from it.

There's an easy as hell way for them to make money from it. $4 a movie for onDemand viewing like the cable co has, direct from the studios to cut out the middle man. Suck all the business out of PPV and Blockbuster.

Idiots just know how to fight off technology rather than embrace it. Not that it matters to them anyway, since for their part the major studios who would carry out such a plan successfully are already rich as hell.

[dkrift]

Originally posted by Professor Throtex
There's an easy as hell way for them to make money from it. $4 a movie for onDemand viewing like the cable co has, direct from the studios to cut out the middle man. Suck all the business out of PPV and Blockbuster.

Idiots just know how to fight off technology rather than embrace it. Not that it matters to them anyway, since for their part the major studios who would carry out such a plan successfully are already rich as hell.

Agreed, but you know there will be a way to get that stream or download into your HD. I think that's what they are worried about. Legal copies being distributed. I guess they could code each stream or download with a serial in order to trace back to the original buyer, but how realistic people would go for that, and there will be leaks somehow.

[Throtex]

Originally posted by dkrift
Agreed, but you know there will be a way to get that stream or download into your HD. I think that's what they are worried about. Legal copies being distributed. I guess they could code each stream or download with a serial in order to trace back to the original buyer, but how realistic people would go for that, and there will be leaks somehow.

There are always gonna be losses. I see teenage kids open the back doors of movie theaters now and then and let their friends in for free... as long as they've budgetted for that crap they'll be fine. They just want to get an even larger margin out of the 'next big thing'. My message is to give up and just go with a non-majorly-obtrusive technology that would do enough to discourage some random kid who just wants to sneak in a free movie without being a hassle or a major expense for people who want to legitimately watch it. Nothing stops people from copying shit off of pay-per-view, but I can damned well guarantee it's profitable or else they wouldn't do it.

Any more complexity to their copy protection methods only screws the honest people while doing little to deter the career pirates.