[p2p-hackers] network coding put to practical p2p content dist. use

[Nick Johnson]

On 21/06/2005, at 6:16 AM, coderman wrote:

> On 6/19/05, Nick Johnson <arachnid at notdot.net> wrote:
>
>> How is the use or otherwise of a tracker in any way related to the  
>> use of
>> rateless codes?
>>
>
> coordinating exchange of authentic blocks of coded content is the crux
> of the issue.  if you have centralized control, error / online coding
> does not get you any benefit over the current method of using verbatim
> blocks of data.
>
> in a decentralized context, meaning no centralized tracker, the issue
> of authentic coded blocks is difficult and conveniently not described
> in the network coding paper.  if you can do this efficiently then
> there is potential that network coding (with each peer performing
> re-encodes with current data) can be efficient without requiring the
> centralized control that is critical to the current unencoded block
> transfer coordination in bittorrent.

Trackers in BitTorrent don't deal with individual data blocks - only  
peer discovery.

-Nick Johnson