Capillary multi-path routing with FEC for real-time multimedia

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Abstract – Using forward error correction (FEC) in off-line streaming, together with large buffers, yields spectacular results. However real-time streaming puts hard restrictions on the buffer size and therefore does not allow FEC to deal with long link failures on a single path route. In contrast multi-path routing can make FEC effective also for real-time streaming. In this paper we introduce a capillary routing algorithm offering a wide range of multi-path routing topologies starting from a simple (max-flow multi-path) solution toward more reliable and secure schemes obtained by recursively spreading individual sub-flows. The friendliness of a particular multi-path routing is measured by a measure called Adaptive Redundancy Overall Need (ARON), which is proportional to the sender’s total channel coding effort needed for recovering the failure of each link in the multi-path route. A dozen of capillary routing layers, built on several hundreds of network samples obtained from a random walk wireless Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET), are rated with ARON. They show that the FEC friendliness improves substantially as the spreading of the routing grows.