Fault-Tolerance of Capillary Multi-Path Routing for Real-Time Multimedia Streaming with Forward Error Correction

Using forward error correction (FEC) in off-line streaming, permitting large buffers, yields spectacular results, but real-time streaming puts hard restrictions on the buffer size and therefore does not allow FEC to deal with long link failures on a single path route. Multi-path routing however can make FEC efficient also for realtime streaming. In this paper, we introduce a 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 can be measured by adaptive redundancy overall need (ARON), which is proportional to the sender´s total channel coding effort needed for recovering the failure of each individual link in the multi-path route. A dozen of capillary routing layers are built on several hundreds of network samples obtained from a random walk wireless mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). Rating of these routing suggestions with ARON shows that the FEC friendliness improves substantially as the spreading of the routing grows