[p2p-hackers] First use of FEC in P2P Systems?

[Jim McCoy]

On Mar 9, 2004, at 2:03 AM, Justin Chapweske wrote:

> Well it depends on your definition of P2P, but the first usage of FEC 
> in
> a modern "P2P" system that I am aware of was when I invented swarming
> downloads.

Actually, Digital Fountain and the work of the reliable multicast group 
predated you by quite a while.

> But, if you're just looking at increasing reliability and not Swarming,
> then I'd be very surprised if Shamir, with his secret sharing algorithm
> in '79, didn't at least contemplate such a use.

While Shamir may have contemplated such a use I am not aware of him 
publishing anything about it.  The oldest precedents for the 
application of error-correction to increase data retrieval reliability 
probably go back to the RAID work initially done at Berkeley and if you 
expand the scope slightly to what most of us would consider "p2p" then 
the earliest such system is probably Zebra, although this was more of a 
"traditional" RAID network filesystem designed as a distributed set of 
storage agents.  The earliest system that most of us would look at and 
call "p2p storage" I think would be the Archival Intermemory research 
from NEC Research in 97 (and Frangipani if you are thinking more of a 
replicated data layer that error-correction could be applied to...)

> I think Publius used Shamir's algorithm, anyone know when that was
> introduced?

Early 2000, so even Mojo Nation predated this one... (we were using a 
variant of Shamir's information dispersal algorithm at the time, not 
FEC :)

Jim