Fault-Tolerant Multi-Path Routing for Real-Time Streaming with Erasure Resilient Codes

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 multipath 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 AdHoc Network (MANET), are rated with ROR. We show that the sender’s channel coding effort decreases substantially as the spreading of the routing grows.