Does packet replication along multipath really help?

For reliability of communication and simplicity, oftentimes packets are replicated along predetermined multiple routes to the destination. Alternatively, for traffic load balancing, data traffic is distributed along disjoint or meshed multiple routes to the destination – called selective forwarding. In this paper, we study and quantify the resource usage in these schemes, namely, packet replication and selective forwarding approaches. Our evaluation shows that for successfully routing a message using forward error correction coding technique, packet replication wastes much higher network resource, such as channel bandwidth and battery power.