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From: narten@arthur.cs.purdue.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: rec.ham-radio,comp.dcom.modems
Subject: Re: Ham radio & USENET
Message-ID: <1810@arthur.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: Thu, 27-Aug-87 11:19:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: arthur.1810
Posted: Thu Aug 27 11:19:11 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Aug-87 16:33:34 EDT
Sender: news@arthur.cs.purdue.edu
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
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Xref: utgpu rec.ham-radio:2171 comp.dcom.modems:795

In article  <275@ndmath.UUCP> milo@ndmath.UUCP (Greg Corson) writes:
>I wonder, with all the discussion of late about Hams setting up 9600 & 56K-baud
>links do you think at some point one of the larger ham stations (perhaps the
>ARRL ones?) might consider doing broadcasts of usenet news feeds?  There could
>be several set times of day when the news would be sent, the data in the
>broadcasts could be overlapped in case someone missed part of it.
>
>It would certainly save a lot of people a lot of phone bills, all you would need
>to receive the feeds would be a decent receiver and modem (since you wouldn't
>be transmitting you wouldn't need a license).

An underlying assumption being made here is that it is possible to get
end-to-end reliability without feedback from the receiver to the
sender. This cannot be done. Furthermore, packet loss of 50% or more is
not uncommon in packet radio, essentially requiring the receiver to send
acknowledgments indicating what he has and hasn't recieved.

Secondly, to get reliability between a single sender and multiple
receivers requires specialized protocols. TCP only works in the single
sender, single receiver paradigm. Several such protocols have been
discussed in the literature [Chang&Maxemchuk 83, Birman&Joseph 87],
but whether they are suitable for this environment (e.g. high packet
loss, longer delays than LANs) would have to be examined.
-- 
Thomas Narten
narten@cs.purdue.EDU or {ihnp4, allegra}!purdue!narten