Re: Ethernet Error Correction

[Albert D. Cahalan]

Karel Kulhavy writes:

> Let's say I have two PC's, with ethernet NIC's. An atmospherical optical link
> (full duplex) is between them, connected via AUI. The optics goes crazy when
> there is a fog of course. But dropping a single bit in 1500 bytes makes a lot
> of mess.  There is also unsused src and dest address (12 bytes) which is
> obvious and superfluous.  What about kicking the address off and putting some
> error correction codes (like Hamming) into it and putting the cards into
> promisc mode?  It would make the link work on bigger distance and on thicker
> mist.  We could even dynamically change the ECC/data ratio for example with
> Reed Solomon Codes. Ethernet modulation is strong gainst sync dropouts so the
> bits usually remain their place, just some of them happen to flip. We could
> also kick the "lenght" field because end of packet is recognized by a pulse
> longer than 200ns, not neither by ECC nor by the length (am I right?).

Do something like RAID 5 over multiple packets. Then you can
handle cards that just drop corrupt packets.