Protocol level solutions for the packet reordering problem

The Internet is experiencing an exponential growth in users and network traffic. As the Internet grows larger and larger, the performance of the network is subjected to severe performance degrading issues such as congestion in the network, link failures, corruption of packets and reordering of packets. In this thesis, we examine the problem of packet reordering in networks and how reordering of packets degrade the performance of the TCP protocol. We present an analysis on the effects of packet reordering in networks and propose mechanisms to improve the TCP performance in the presence of packet reordering. In the chapter on the effects of packet reordering, we present an analysis on the problem of packet reordering on networks and have presented the results. These results show the poor performance of the existing TCP protocols in the presence of packet reordering. In the chapter on EPDNv1.0 for symmetric routing flows, we propose a mechanism called the Explicit Packet Drop Notification Version 1.0 for networks that follow symmetric routing. The idea of EPDNv1.0 is to inform the sender about dropped packets in the gateway. In the chapter on Reorder Detecting TCP (RD-TCP), we propose a mechanism, which uses the EPDNv1.0 to proactively detect whether a packet has been reordered in the network or not. Based on this detection, the sender