More and more of today’s computing is happening in “the cloud” — not just on the desktop or even on the big servers in the basement but all over the Net at once. Government agencies, banks and companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft maintain dozens of huge data centers all over the country and the world, all sharing data back and forth over high-speed fiber-optic lines.

But the data sharing doesn’t always go smoothly; sometimes the short streams of ones and zeros known as data packets get distorted, delayed or dropped altogether. “It is not unusual for network packets travel 10,000 miles just to be dropped by the end-host,” explained Hakim Weatherspoon, assistant professor of computer science, “but it is frustrating.” Lost packets have to be resent, slowing down the overall data transfer.

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