Multiplexed Streaming Codes for Multi-hop Multi-link Communication Networks

This paper studies the transmission of a stream of data packets through a multi-hop multi-link communication network. The source generate sequential source packets and transmits them through a network to a destination. Each intermediary node is allowed to perform any processing operation in order to successfully forward the message to the destination. Each link connecting two nodes is subject to an adversarial packet erasure channel, where the number of erasures is limited. The destination must recover each source packet within a delay deadline, otherwise that packet is considered lost. The particular case when each hop consists of only one link has been studied by Domanovitz et. al in 1. We extend this work to the multi-link scenario by multiplexing multiple copies of streaming codes in 1 and optimizing the rate using a linear programming framework. We also demonstrate how our framework can be naturally extended when there is a different propagation delay on each link. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed approach provides significant improvements over baseline schemes.We further demonstrate that our proposed scheme also provides improved audio quality over baseline schemes in experiments involving Gilbert-Elliott channels.