Reliable Multi-Path Routing Schemes for Real-Time Streaming.pdf

Reliable Multi-Path Routing Schemes for Real-Time Streaming Emin Gabrielyan Switzernet Sàrl and EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland emin.gabrielyan@ Roger D. Hersch école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland rd.hersch@epfl.ch Abstract In off-line streaming, packet level erasure resilient Forward Error Correction (FEC) 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. Further path diversity, however, increases the number of underlying links increasing the total link failure rate, requiring from the sender possibly 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 protection of the communication. With the capillary routing algorithm, introduced in this paper 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 the further diversity of dual-path routing is achieved by the capillary routing algorithm. 1. Introduction Packetized IP communication behaves like an erasure channel. Information is chopped into packets, and each packet is either received without error or not received. Packet level erasure resilient FEC codes can mitigate packet losses by adding redundant packets, usually of the same size as the source packets. In off-line streaming erasure resilient codes achieve extremely high reliability in many challenging network conditions [MacKay05]. For example, it is possible to de