Rating of Routing by Redundancy Overall Need

Thanks to the large buffering time of off-line streaming applications, erasure resilient forward error correction (FEC) codes can improve the reliability of communication particularly well. However real-time streaming puts hard restrictions on the buffer size making FEC inefficient for combating long link failures on single path routes. Path diversity is orthogonal to buffering and permits real-time streaming to also benefit from application of FEC. We introduce a capillary routing algorithm offering layer by layer a wide range of multi-path routing topologies starting from a simple solution and evolving toward reliable routing patterns with highly developed path diversity. The friendliness of a multi-path routing pattern is rated by the overall amount of FEC redundancy required for combating the non-simultaneous failures of all links of the communication footprint. We rated the friendliness of a dozen of capillary routing layers, built on several hundreds of network samples obtained from a random walk mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). The overall requirement in redundant FEC codes decreases substantially as the spreading of the routing grows