This paper was pretty cool! The basic idea is encoding packets for a bunch of destinations by XORing with packets that the clients at those destinations have sent. By doing so, wireless traffic congestion can be decreased pretty significantly, and there may be some possible multicast options to be explored there. Only one problem arises that I can think of: secure data.
It's already not very difficult to create a packet-sniffing device, so one wonders how secure data could be transferred over such an encoded network. I don't think this is a dealbreaker for typical Web surfing, video streaming (well, with piracy, maybe it is), or other low-security applications, but for something like banking networks, military application (battlefield networks come to mind), or any other network containing sensitive data, it seems like broadcasting all packets mixed together could have some serious implications. With coding, it seems that there is a good chance that every node could reasonably figure out every other node's packet contents simply by overhearing what they send and receiving the response. This is a problem with wireless networks already, but it feels like there are even more variables when we actually rely on overhearing in the network.
Well, that sounded like I'm coming down hard on this XOR coding. I do like it; just have to wonder about its interaction with secure applications.
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