Company Details

n-hop technologies has developed BATS, a revolutionary communication technology based on the fundamental research on network coding at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The two main founders of our company, Prof. Raymond Yeung and Prof. Shenghao Yang, are the inventors of this technology.

In loT, most devices cannot be directly connected to the wireline network, but rather need to go through many other wireless loT devices. Thus wireless multi-hop networks will be in great demand. BATS can dramatically improve the performance of such networks. The gain brought about by BATS, which increases with the number of hops, is unbounded. With BATS, the transmission throughput can sustain after tens or even hundreds of hops.

BATS has already been proven successful in the Hong Kong Government's pilot smart lamppost system. A very wide range of other applications can benefit from BATS, including 5G, loT, V2X, satellite communication, and underwater acoustic communication.

It is a well-known problem that in a wireless multi-hop network, the transmission throughput drops drastically when the number of hops exceeds 5 or 6, due to the accumulation of packet loss. BATS is a disruptive communication technology that can break this "multi-hop curse". With BATS, the transmission throughput can sustain after tens or even hundreds of hops.

BATS can dramatically increase the throughput of a lossy multi-hop network over any physical layer, be it short-range wireless (e.g., Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee), medium-range wireless (e.g., LTE), long-range wireless (e.g., VSAT for satellite communication), or even underwater communication (e.g., acoustic, optical). A very wide range of applications will benefit from BATS. In particular, BATS has been successfully deployed in the Hong Kong Government's pilot smart lamppost project, in which BATS provides the smart lampposts with wireless Internet connection without the need to lay optical fibre to every lamppost.