Fault-tolerant multi-path routing for real-time streaming with erasure resilient codes

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On the web site of ICWN 2006

Abstract: Thanks to large buffers, Forward Error Correction (FEC) improves the reliability of off-line streaming significantly. Real-time streaming however puts hard restrictions on the buffer size leaving FEC helpless for combating long link failures on a single path route. Compared with buffering, multi-path routing is another orthogonal method, which can make FEC efficient also for real-time streaming. We introduce a capillary routing algorithm offering multi-path routing topologies of increasing path diversity. We also propose a scalar value called Redundancy Overall Requirement (ROR) for measuring the friendliness of a multi-path routing pattern toward FEC. A dozen of capillary routing suggestions, built on several hundreds of network samples obtained from a simulation of a wireless random walk Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET), are rated with ROR. We show that the sender’s channel coding effort decreases substantially as the spreading of the routing grows.

Keywords: Capillary routing, multi-path routing, fault-tolerance, real-time streaming, Voice over IP, erasure resilient codes