Rethinking networking
This is the second article in a two-part series on MIT contributions to the fledgling field of network coding (part one is available here).Today, data traveling over the Internet are much like crates of oranges traveling the interstates in the back of a truck. The data are loaded in at one end, unloaded at the other, and nothing much happens to them in between.About 10 years ago, electrical engineers suggested that bundles of data could be transmitted over a network more efficiently if, instead of passing unaltered from one end to the other, they were scrambled together along the way and unscrambled at the end. In 2003, MIT electrical engineering professor Muriel Médard and her colleagues proved the counterintuitive result that, in many cases, the best way to scramble data together was to do it randomly. Last year, the paper in which the researchers presented their findings received an award...