Sending IP packets over multiple parallel links is in extensive use in today’s Internet and its use is growing due to its scalability, reliability and cost-effectiveness. To maximize the efficiency of parallel links, load balancing is necessary among the links, but it may cause the problem of packet reordering. Since packet reordering impairs TCP performance, it is important to reduce the amoun...

Contention resolution schemes in optical burst switched networks (OBS) as well as contention avoidance schemes delay burst delivery and change the burst arrival sequence. The burst arrival sequence usually changes the packet arrival sequence and degrades the upper layer protocols performance, e.g., the throughput of the transmission control protocol (TCP). In this paper, we present and analyze ...

TCP's burstiness is usually regarded as harmful, or at best, inconvenient. Instead, this thesis suggests a new perspective and examines whether TCP's burstiness is useful for certain applications. It claims that burstiness can be harnessed to insulate traffic from packet reordering caused by route change. We introduce the use of flowlets, a new abstraction for a burst of packets from a particul...

The article describes the recent standardisation initiatives for packet reordering metrics in IP networks, the methods of measuring it and also provides a discussion of the common factors affecting ordered packet delivery, based on real examples.

Numerous studies have shown that packet reordering is common, especially in high speed networks where there is high degree of parallelism and different link speeds. Reordering of packets decreases the TCP performance of a network, mainly because it leads to overestimation of the congestion of the network. We consider wired networks and analyze the performance of such networks when reordering of...

In this paper, we present an analytical model that characterizes TCP NewReno’s goodput as a function of roundtrip time, average time duration between handoffs, average number of packets reordered during a handoff, and the congestion window threshold. In cellular networks, the effective packet-loss probability for a flow experiencing handoffs is not exactly equal to the physical-layer packet-los...

This document specifies an algorithm for the detection and quantification of packet reordering for TCP. In the absence of explicit congestion notification from the network, TCP uses only packet loss as an indication of congestion. One of the signals TCP uses to determine loss is the arrival of three duplicate acknowledgments. However, this heuristic is not always correct, notably in the case wh...