Multi-path Solutions to Improve Network Performance

Behnaz Arzani

With the increasing number of internet users, providing performance guarantees to these
users is becoming increasingly difficult. In wireless settings, the problem of providing
network performance guarantees is even more difficult due to variabilities in link
characteristics. Changes in wireless link performance, such as packet loss rate, occur at
shorter time scales compared to their wired counterparts. Thus, the finite reaction time of
traditional solutions, eg Routing, make them unreliable in mitigating the impact of these
variations on user performance. Such variability in the delivered rates could be detrimental
to particular types of applications such as video and audio which are sensitive to short term
variations.