A Distributed Adaptive Multipath Redundant Transmission Mechanism for High-Reliability Communication over Wide-Area Networks

Mission-critical applications such as telemedicine demand extremely high communication reliability. Multipath redundant transmission ensures reliable packet delivery by concurrently forwarding replicated packets over multiple paths. However, fewer studies focus on implementing redundant transmission in a distributed manner by in-network nodes, which limits the applicability and efficiency of such mechanisms in wide-area networks. This paper proposes a Distributed Adaptive Multipath Redundant Transmission (DAMR-T) mechanism, where intermediate nodes autonomously determine replica counts and make routing decisions based on local link conditions and a custom residual loss budget field in each packet. Simulations show that DAMR-T achieves reliability comparable to the source-side replication scheme while incurring the lowest redundant bandwidth overhead among all evaluated schemes. Specifically, it reduces redundant bandwidth radio by an average of 35.44% compared to the source-side replication scheme, with up to 56.1% in specific scenarios. It also achieves the lowest 95th percentile first-arrival delay across all baselines.