Path Diversity over Packet Switched Networks: Performance Analysis and Rate Allocation
Shervan Fashandi, Shahab Oveis Gharan, Amir K. Khandani

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the use of path diversity with FEC over multiple network paths modeled as erasure channels, proving exponential decay of irrecoverable loss and proposing an efficient rate allocation algorithm.
Contribution
It introduces a theoretical framework for optimal rate allocation over multiple paths with FEC, including asymptotic analysis and a practical heuristic algorithm.
Findings
Irrecoverable loss probability decays exponentially with many paths.
Paths with quality below a threshold are assigned zero rate.
Proposed heuristic closely approximates optimal allocation in practice.
Abstract
Path diversity works by setting up multiple parallel connections between the end points using the topological path redundancy of the network. In this paper, \textit{Forward Error Correction} (FEC) is applied across multiple independent paths to enhance the end-to-end reliability. Network paths are modeled as erasure Gilbert-Elliot channels. It is known that over any erasure channel, \textit{Maximum Distance Separable} (MDS) codes achieve the minimum probability of irrecoverable loss among all block codes of the same size. Based on the adopted model for the error behavior, we prove that the probability of irrecoverable loss for MDS codes decays exponentially for an asymptotically large number of paths. Then, optimal rate allocation problem is solved for the asymptotic case where the number of paths is large. Moreover, it is shown that in such asymptotically optimal rate allocation, each…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsCooperative Communication and Network Coding · Interconnection Networks and Systems · Error Correcting Code Techniques
