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