Path Diversity Over Packet Switched Networks: Performance Analysis and Rate Allocation

Path diversity works by setting up multiple parallel connections between the endpoints using the topological path redundancy of the network. In this paper, forward error correction (FEC) is applied across multiple independent paths to enhance the end-to-end reliability. We prove that the probability of irrecoverable loss (P_E) decays exponentially with the number of paths. Furthermore, the rate allocation (RA) problem across independent paths is studied. Our objective is to find the optimal RA, i.e., the allocation that minimizes P_E. The RA problem is solved for a large number of paths. Moreover, it is shown that in such asymptotically optimal RA, each path is assigned a positive rate iff its quality is above a certain threshold. Finally, using memoization technique, a heuristic suboptimal algorithm with polynomial runtime is proposed for RA over a finite number of paths. This algorithm converges to the asymptotically optimal RA when the number of paths is large. For a practical number of paths, the simulation results demonstrate the close-to-optimal performance of the proposed algorithm .