Very cool efforts here. Curious what the speed is without those instructions present on the cpu, and what hardware this was run on.
The concept of a fountain seems interesting but what is a good use case? Variable strength error correction?
The concept of a fountain seems interesting but what is a good use case? Variable strength error correction?
Receivers would listen for as many of these packets as they can, as and when they can (the transmission can be "lossy"), and if a receiver pickups up 100 unique packets, any 100 unique packets in any order, it'll have a 99.9% (or something along those lines) chance of decoding the message successfully. Each extra unique packet adds a 9 to the chances.
That's why the "fountain". It's a data fountain, and you can grab any quantity of data off it at any point and still have a good chance of reconstructing the message.
With a fountain code, it’s not a problem. If you miss one packet, you have a 99% chance of making do with the 5,000,001st packet that comes. 99.9% of making do with the 5,000,002nd packet etc.
In other words, without a fountain code, if you want to reliably receive 1GB, and you miss a packet, your satellite will have to transmit 2GB just for your sake, which is expensive af. With a fountain code, it’ll only need to send 1.01GB.