draft-papadopoulos-hemb-00 IETF Independent Submission Stream · Informational
- Prior art research: Complete (3 independent passes)
- Reference implementation: Production-validated (246 decoded, 0 failed)
- Field hardware validation: LoRa+TCP confirmed; LoRa+SBD+SMS pending April 2026
- RFC submission target: January 2027
In disaster response, maritime, polar, and contested environments, the surviving communication channels — LoRa mesh radio, Iridium satellite SBD, APRS/AX.25, SMS, and GSM ring signals — share no common protocol stack. They differ in MTU by five orders of magnitude (1 byte to 100 KB), in latency by three orders of magnitude (100 ms to 90 s), and in cost by an unbounded factor (EUR 0 to EUR 0,05/msg).
No existing protocol bonds these bearers simultaneously with coded redundancy. MPTCP, MP-QUIC, and GRE bonding require IP on every subflow. LACP requires homogeneous Ethernet. DTN provides store-and-forward but not simultaneous multi-bearer coding.
HeMB bonds N physical bearers into one virtual bearer using Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) over GF(256). Any K of N coded symbols from any bearer combination reconstruct the original payload — arrival order and bearer identity are irrelevant. Cost-weighted allocation ensures free bearers (LoRa, APRS) are exhausted before paid bearers (Iridium SBD) receive symbols.
HeMB does not claim novelty in RLNC, any-K-of-N recovery, or multipath transmission. These are well-established (Ho 2006, RFC 5053, US9537759B2).
HeMB's contribution is the combination:
- Below-IP operation on physically incompatible bearers with no shared protocol stack — no IP, no TCP, no shared framing
- RLNC across latency ratios exceeding 100:1 — up to 900:1 (Iridium SBD 90s vs ZigBee 100ms) in a single coded generation. Prior art (US9537759B2) tested max ~100:1.
- Cost-weighted symbol allocation as a primary constraint — free bearers exhausted before paid bearers receive any symbols
No prior system addresses this combination.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Generations decoded | 246 |
| Generations failed | 0 |
| Decode latency P50 | 0 ms |
| Decode latency P95 | 25 ms |
| Symbols sent (stress test) | 9,675 |
| Cost incurred | EUR 0,000000 |
| Bugs found and fixed | 10 |
| Tests (3 codebases) | 65 passing |
spec/
sections/ RFC draft sections (abstract, intro, related work, etc.)
prior-art/ Three prior art research passes + summary
field-data/ Production hardware validation results
impl/ Reference implementation notes
tools/ Build scripts (xml2rfc)
The reference implementation lives in MeshSat: https://github.com/cubeos-app/meshsat/tree/main/internal/hemb
HeMB is also ported to:
- MeshSat Hub: https://github.com/cubeos-app/meshsat-hub
- MeshSat Android: https://github.com/cubeos-app/meshsat-android
- IPoUGRS — IP over Unanswered GSM Ring Signals (HeMB bearer type)
- MeshSat — Multi-transport mesh and satellite gateway (reference implementation)
Kyriakos Papadopoulos · Leiden, Netherlands kyriakos@papadopoulos.tech
Apache 2.0 — specification and documentation Reference implementation: GPLv3 (via MeshSat)