wee doors banging

I like to keep abreast of new technology, and recently I came across some new research from a group of networking boffins based in Silicone Valley that outlined a relatively simple plan to enlarge the volume of data the Internet can carry.

To explain this research, we first need a little bit of background information.

Modern digital computers – and therefore the Internet - currently operate on binary logic principles based on the fundamental values of one and zero. These basic units are known as “Binary Digits”, or “BITs” for short, and computers have operated this way since the dawn of the electronic computing age in the mid 20th century.

However, the computing pioneers of the 1940s could not have envisaged the recent surge of bandwidth heavy applications such as music and video streaming, online gaming, social networking and so on. The binary system, while adequate for the requirements of the past, is creaking at the seams under these modern workloads.

The new research describes a plan to break away from the outdated and limiting two-value binary system by adopting instead three-valued trinary logic principles, the fundamental units of which are known as ”Trinary Digits”, or “TITs”.

According to the researchers, because a “2″ isn’t much wider than a “1″ or “0″, adding a third fundamental value to the base Internet data transmission schemes wouldn’t take up much more space, and so would allow more information to be transmitted in the same time. The end result would be an immediate (almost) 50% increase in network capacity, essentially for free.

To push-up to this wonder number and achieve the best enlargement of bandwidth in recent years, the researchers have designed a number of new communication protocols and prototype hardware units.

The fundamental Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) would be replaced by trinary extended versions known as Trinary Enabled Advanced TCP (TEAT) and New Internet Protocol (NIP) respectively. For low latency applications such as online gaming, the existing User Datagram Protocol (UDP) would be replaced by trinary enabled Jumbo User Grams (JUG) .

For it to be successful, a new trinary Internet must retain backward compatibility with existing infrastructure and applications. To enable this, prototype Binary Adaptive Processor (BAP) hardware units have been created to allow TITs and BITs to interact smoothly using an innovative Binary Out Of Band (BOOB) technique. It is envisaged that ISPs will eventually install large numbers of dual-redundant BAP pairs in racks, though the researchers admit they do yet have some difficulty in operating the prototype BAP Rack Assembly (BRA) units that would enable this. “There’s always a catch”, quipped one of the team.

TITs are exciting enough on their own, but the researchers are already looking beyond with theoretical plans to use advanced mathematical integration techniques to combine multiple TITs into the same space, offering even greater transmission capacity. This work is in its early stages though. “As yet the Combined Linear Integrated TIT is a purely theoretical construct with no basis in reality”, said a spokesman, “However we are confident you will see many TITs, TEAT/NIP, JUGs, BAP/BOOB and BRAs on the Internet in the near future”.

I, for one, am looking forward to that day.