Uninformed: Informative Information for the Uninformed

Vol 8» 2007.Sep


Unreliable Transport

To mitigate the unreliable properties of the underlying transport protocols used to transmit the cover-medium, the message header contains a sequence number. This sequence number coupled with the message caching system allows the recipient to both identify when an expected message is missing as well as request a resend of a particular message via a control message. This property also provides the added benefit of detecting erroneously or maliciously replayed messages.

When considering potential solutions for this problem, various types of Forward Error Correction[31] (FEC) were considered. Due to the limited space available for message data as a result of the size of cover-medium available, the additional space required for redundant data by most algorithms considered deemed them to be unfit for purpose within this research effort's context.