Is TCP Packet Reordering Always Harmful?

IP networks do not provide any guarantee that packets belonging to the same flow are delivered in the correct order. It can be argued that out-of-order reception of packets is limited to pathological network conditions (such as link failures, etc). However, it has been experimentally proven in the past that packet reordering is a phenomenon which do occurs even in normal network operation, due to a number of link-level and/or router-level implementation features such as local parallelism and load balancing. Packet reordering is intuitively considered as a negative phenomenon, which may severely affect TCP traffic performance since it is expected to cause inefficient usage of the available link bandwidth and is expected to induce bursty transmission behaviour. Instead, in this paper, we show that a limited amount of reordering can improve network performance. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper which claims that TCP packet reordering, rather than being harmful, may ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: MASCOTS
• Authors: Giovanni Neglia, Vincenzo Falletta, Giuseppe Bianchi
• Keywords: MASCOTS 2004, MASCOTS 2007, Network Performance, Packet Reordering, TCP Traffic Performance