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

Use of FEC in off-line streaming, offering large buffers, gives spectacular results; but real-time streaming puts hard restrictions on the buffer size leaving FEC helpless for combating long link failures on a single path route. Another orthogonal method, the multi-path routing, can make FEC effective also for the real-time streaming, which has been already shown on examples with an alternate path. In this paper we introduce 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 Adaptive Redundancy Overall Need (ARON), which is proportional to the sender’s total channel coding effort needed for combating 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 showing that the FEC friendliness improves substantially as the routing grows more spreader.