On Forward Error Correction with Hamming Code for multi-path communications

Multi-path communication and Forward Error Correction (FEC) are able to reduce packet delay and improve reliability for high error-rate communications, such as satellite transmission networks, underwater acoustic networks and underground networks. This paper presents a new scheme to integrate FEC based on Hamming Code (11-7) and multi-path communications to combat the inherent unreliability of wireless networks. Different from the traditional mechanisms, the proposed approach handles the segment of 11 — bit Hamming Code as a unit to vote and reconstruct the original packet which can achieve the high efficiency of packet reconstruction. Performance results reveal that the proposed new scheme leads to significant performance improvement over the existing multi-path based mechanisms.