Effect of path diversity on the loss performance of UDP packets over the internet

In this paper we investigate the effect of path diversity on the packet loss performance through simulations and experiments using three overlay networks created on top of the PlanetLab testbed. The overlay network consists of a number of relay nodes that are positioned around the Internet. In each of the overlay networks UDP packets are streamed from a client to a destination for a period of 50 days, across up to six paths with a static packet dispatching algorithm. From the results obtained, we can see that increasing the number of paths could increase as well as decrease the packet loss probability, depending on the network environment and the structure of the multiple paths created. We have also investigated the correlation in the underlying network and demonstrated the performance of the metric defined.