1 Introduction
In this paper, we study the problem of using path diversification to provide probabilistic guarantees on quality-of-service (QoS) in multihop wireless networks. The QoS guarantees are bounds on the end-to-end delay and probability of packet loss (PPL). Path diversification has two components: Forward Error Correction (FEC) and load balancing. The source uses FEC to encode each packet into fragments [1], where is the number of fragments in the original packet and is the number of parity fragments. The source then transmits subsets of fragments over multiple disjoint paths. The allocation of fragments on each path is determined with a load balancing algorithm. The destination node attempts to reconstruct the packet with fragments it receives in less than seconds after the original transmission. The reconstruction is possible with the FEC code if the destination receives or more fragments. Our objective is to devise a load balancing algorithm which minimizes the probability that the destination receives less than fragments (i.e., minimizes PPL) when the delay is fixed.