Reliable Multi-Path Routing Schemes for Real-Time Streaming

Emin Gabrielyan, Roger D. Hersch

ICDT’06 - International Conference on Digital Telecommunications, August 29-31, 2006, Cap Esterel, Côte d’Azur, France

In off-line streaming, packet level erasure resilient codes rely on the unrestricted buffering time at the receiver. In real-time streaming, the extremely short playback buffering time makes FEC inefficient for protecting a single path communication against long link failures. It has been shown that one alternative path added to a single path route makes packet level FEC applicable even when the buffering time is limited. However path diversity increases the number of underlying links, thereby increasing the total link failure rate, which may possibly require from the sender more FEC packets. We introduce a scalar coefficient for rating a multi-path routing topology of any complexity. It is called Redundancy Overall Requirement (ROR) and is proportional to the total number of adaptive FEC packets required for protecting the communication. With the capillary routing algorithm introduced in this chapter we build thousands of multi-path routing patterns. By computing their ROR coefficients, we show that contrary to the expectations, the overall requirement in FEC codes is reduced when increasing the path diversity according to a new capillary routing algorithm.

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