Optimal Multipath Routing for Performance Guarantees in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of optimal multipath routing for providing application performance guarantees in multi-hop wireless networks, using multiple description video streaming as our target application. We address this problem, which is shown to be NP-hard, with a novel reformulation-linearization technique (RLT) and branch-and-bound-based approach, and develop an algorithm that produces a pair of paths within the (1 - epsiv) range of the global optimum. The proposed algorithm is computationally efficient and this (1 - epsiv) optimal algorithm provides an elegant tradeoff between optimality and computational complexity.