Streaming Erasure Codes over Multi-hop Relay Network

A typical path over the internet is composed of multiple hops. When considering the transmission of a sequence of messages (streaming messages) through packet erasure channel over a three-node network, it has been shown that taking into account the erasure pattern of each segment can result in improved performance compared to treating the channel as a point-to-point link. Since rarely there is only a single relay between the sender and the destination, it calls for trying to extend this scheme to more than a single relay. In this paper, we first extend the upper bound on the rate of transmission of a sequence of messages for any number of relays. We further suggest an achievable adaptive scheme that is shown to achieve the upper bound up to the size of an additional header that is required to allow each receiver to meet the delay constraints.