On PLR Estimation for a Multipath Route with Failure Correlation

It is well-known that routing in wireless networks is not the same as in wired ones. Apart from numerous problems such as hidden station effect, surprisingly, wireless has several features favourable for multihop transmission. In particular, broadcast nature of wireless channel allows to improve transmission reliability by usage of multipath routing. However, on various paths, transmission errors can be correlated, and calculating packet loss ratio (PLR) is a tricky issue. At the same time, QoS aware routing protocols need to calculate PLR in the presence of correlated failures on the fly. In this paper, we address the problem of PLR calculation over a multipath route in the presence of correlated errors and propose a computational efficient solution for this problem.