Capillary Routing for reliable real-time streaming

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Abstract: Applying forward error correction (FEC) in off-line streaming applications allowing for large buffering time considerably improves the quality and performance of communications under challenging network conditions. In case of real-time streaming, there are hard restrictions on the buffer size and therefore, FEC cannot compensate for long link failures on single path routes. However, multi-path routing, orthogonal to buffering, can make FEC effective also for real-time streaming. We introduce a capillary routing algorithm offering layer by layer a wide range of multi-path routing topologies starting from a simple multi-path solution and evolving toward more reliable and secure schemes. The friendliness of a particular multi-path routing scheme is rated by a measure called Redundancy Overall Requirement (ROR), which is proportional to the overall number of redundant FEC packets required for combating the individual failures of all links 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 ROR. We show that the overall amount of FEC code decreases substantially as the spreading of the routing grows.

Keywords: capillary routing, real-time streaming, fault-tolerance, multi-path routing, path-diversity