Fault-Tolerant Real-Time Streaming with FEC thanks to Capillary Multi-Path Routing

Abstract: Erasure resilient FEC codes in off-line packetized streaming rely on time diversity. This requires unrestricted buffering time at the receiver. In real-time streaming the playback buffering time must be very short. Path diversity is an orthogonal strategy. However, the large number of long paths increases the number of underlying links and consecutively the overall link failure rate. This may increase the overall requirement in redundant FEC packets for combating the link failures. We introduce the Redundancy Overall Requirement (ROR) metric, a routing coefficient specifying the total number of FEC packets required for compensation of all underlying link failures. We present a capillary routing algorithm for constructing layer by layer steadily diversifying multi-path routing patterns. By measuring the ROR coefficients of a dozen of routing layers on hundreds of network samples, we show that the number of required FEC packets decreases substantially when the path diversity is increased by the capillary routing construction algorithm.