A logical link composed of multiple physical links is in extensive use in today’s Internet and its use is growing due to good scalability, reliability and cost-effectiveness. When IP packets are distributed over such physical links, load unbalancing and packet reordering may occur. Since packet reordering degrades TCP performance, a good traffic distribution method must reduce the amount of reo...

Time-sensitive networks (IEEE TSN or IETF DetNet) may tolerate some packet reordering. Re-sequencing buffers are then used to provide in-order delivery, the parameters of which (timeout, buffer size) affect worst-case delay and jitter. There is so far no precise understanding per-flow reordering metrics nor dimensioning re-sequencing in order guarantees, as required such networks. First, we sho...

In this paper, we describe a RAT (radio access technology) agnostic approach referred to as OMMA (Opportunistic Multi-MAC Aggregation) that can aggregate multiple RATs operating over independent spectral bands. Aggregation and/or traffic shaping is performed above the air interface protocol stacks but below the IP layer. We investigate the problem of minimizing the average packet latency (the s...

Heterogeneous Wireless Network (HWN) is the next generation wireless communication system’s platform where Internet services will be offered and delivered through multiple technologies like WiFi, WiMAX, GSM etc. There are some Internet applications that require high bandwidth and therefore, the bandwidth of an individual interface need to be aggregated to form a high speedy logical link. In thi...

In this paper we study the magnitude and causes of packet reordering in the Internet using data collected at a POP on the Sprint IP Backbone. We develop a methodology that uses TCP packet-level traces to infer the cause for reordering without the need of the complete TCP connection information (i.e. both data and acknowledgement paths). We classify reordering in two classes depending on the cau...

The wireless medium may cause substantial packet losses, rendering Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) inefficient. We propose a cross-layer solution by combining link-layer retransmission techniques and a solution for TCP packet reordering. It is costly to conduct link-layer retransmission with the constraint of orderly packet delivery. We require the link layer to provide reliable packet deli...

Increasing internal parallelism within nodes due to increase in links speeds, and external parallelism among the links due to QoS, ad hoc routing in wireless, etc., point to a significant increase in packet reordering. Application performance degrades considerably due to out-of-order arrivals as well. The concept of “Reorder Buffer-occupancy Density” (RBD) is defined, which provides the statist...

Packet Reordering is a phenomenon on the Internet and must be taken into account when considering performance analysis in wireless networks. Due to various characteristics specific to wireless networks, such as signal fading and mobility, packets may be lost due to congestive and noncongestive losses. The noncongestive losses violate the design principles of some traffic control mechanisms in T...