New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission, even over fluctuating wireless links

In the next issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Gregory Wornell, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, Uri Erez at Tel Aviv University in Israel and Mitchell Trott at Google describe a new coding scheme that guarantees the fastest possible delivery of data over fluctuating wireless connections without requiring prior knowledge of noise levels. The researchers also received a US patent for the technique in September. The scheme works by creating one long codeword for each message, but successively longer chunks of the codeword are themselves good codewords. Error-correcting codes are one of the triumphs of the digital age. They’re a way of encoding information so that it can be transmitted across a communication channel -- such as an optical fiber or a wireless connection -- with perfect fidelity, even in the presence of the corrupting influences known as “noise.”