Today's
Internet transmissions chop files into packets, each of which
is passed from router to router until it reaches its final
destination. But when files get big or are sent to many users,
transmitting them without clogging the network becomes complicated.
With "network coding," an idea
first proposed in 2000, routers would jumble together the bits
from different packets, forming new packets. Recombining the
data in this way gives the end user additional information, theoretically
speeding downloads and increasing network capacity. But early
network coding schemes required a godlike central authority that
knew how the packets were to be combined—a practical impossibility.
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As
a PhD student at MIT, Tracey Ho had a novel alternative: let
network nodes mix packets together at random, tagging them
with just enough information to help end users' computers recover
the original data. This decentralized method automatically
optimizes bandwidth use. "It sounds kind of
insane," says Muriel Medard, Ho's PhD advisor. "But
it's not just that it works; you can't make it work better." As
an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer
science, Ho still studies network coding. But only months after
she first presented her "distributed random network coding" scheme,
Microsoft researchers showed that it can clearly outperform today's
multicast systems. The company has embarked on a project called
Avalanche to commercialize the scheme.
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Tracey
Ho named
among world's Top
35 Young Innovators
under the age of 35 by MIT's Technology Review
