Foundation Projects

In previous ISIF-funded projects, the University of Auckland deployed their coding technology in the form of coded UDP tunnels across satellite links and added our home-grown titration technology to keep excess code overhead of the links. Steinwurf and its founders remain supportive of the project.

For the current project, which was originally planned in a slightly different form for the Chatham Islands but then shifted to Kiribati, the University of Auckland partnered with Kiribati's Ministry for Information, Communication and Technology. The project established a free WiFi hub in the precinct of the Ministry complex in Betio, Tarawa, that connects to the Internet via a coded tunnel to the University of Auckland, running via a Starlink connection. Alternatively, the hub can be connected via an uncoded Starlink connection, allowing the project team to compare the performance.

The simulator lab, which has been supported by two previous ISIF grants, is based at the University of Auckland's School of Computer Science.

The School has also supported the lab with significant amounts of CAPEX, space, staff time and scholarship contributions over the last few years and also serves as a conduit for graduate students involved in the research. The University also has close links with PICISOC, the Pacific chapter of the Internet Society, who have been very supportive of this work in the past, as well as with a number of Internet Service Providers in the Pacific Islands during the pilot field deployments.

Related:

• Field-ready network-coded tunnels for satellite links (award)
• See the project album on Flickr
• Network coding over satellite links: scheduling redundancy for better goodput
• Coding Internet Satellite Links for Better Goodput Under Bandwidth and Latency Constraints
• Realistic simulation of uncoded, coded and proxied Internet satellite links with a flexible hardware-based simulator
• APNIC Blog: The strange cases of consumer-grade routers on puny power supplies