Rely
Rely is our next generation FEC solution designed to enable reliable, ultra-low latency communications over dynamic, mobile and wireless networks.
Rely: Next Generation FEC to the rescue
Rely was developed to address the fundamental problem of packet loss and target minimum latency. Rely is an extremely advanced Erasure Correcting Code (ECC) also called, Forward Erasure Correction (FEC) code. It works by adding repair packets into the data stream. These repair packets correct for packet loss without retransmissions, so avoiding latency.
These repair packets are very powerful because they can repair multiple packets. Taking a postal mail analogy, if you were expecting 100 letters in the mail, but 5 letters were lost, you could use the same 5 repair packets to recover the letters, regardless of which letters are lost.
Rely has a number of features which set it apart from older FEC codes:
The ability to dynamically tune the code’s parameters to adapt to network and traffic conditions at any point in time, ensuring the best possible latency with the minimum amount of overhead.
Rely utilizes unique content aware coding properties to ensure that content which needs to be received in order and in time, such as video frames are optimised for latency not just overall but on a continuous, frame by frame basis.
What is Latency?
Latency is a measure of the time it takes in milliseconds to communicate between nodes in a network. A particular route has a fixed minimum link latency in perfect conditions, but latency is usually higher than this due to inefficiency and poor optimisation.
Why Low Latency Matters.
Many modern applications require communications and collaboration in real time, over increasingly longer distances. To achieve this, networks need to be optimised to ensure data packets get to each destination on the first attempt (or extremely close to it), otherwise there will be added delay (latency) which destroys the user experience.
Networks are Imperfect
Especially over wireless channels, data sometimes faces challenges along its path - just like the postal service sometimes loses your mail or having a fragile item improperly packaged before it’s sent, things get lost or broken along the way. In communications we often refer to these packet losses as erasures.
Overcoming network challenges
To overcome the above difficulties most network protocols use retransmissions, or attempt redelivery of packets. Prevalent protocols are designed to use the minimum amount of bandwidth, only using more bandwidth to resend packets if they are lost along the way. But this adds delay, or latency, which makes real time applications impossible to deliver.