Characterizing End-to-End Packet Reordering with UDP Traffic
Venue
IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC) (2009), pp. 321-324
Publication Year
2009
Authors
Sandra Tinta, Alexander Mohr, Jennifer Wong
BibTeX
Abstract
Packet reordering is an Internet event that degrades the performance of both TCP
and UDP-based applications. In this paper, we present an end-to-end measurement
study of packet reordering of UDP traffic. The goal of the measurement study,
performed on PlanetLab, was to answer four main questions: how prevalent is
reordering across end-to-end paths, what are the time scales of reordered packets,
how correlated is reordering with traffic load, and does the size of a transmitted
packet affect the likelihood of reordering? Overall, our analysis shows that
current UDP traffic reordering is consistent to prior 1990's studies on TCP
traffic, despite increased Internet load and technology advancements, and it adds
to the previous results by identifying additional reordering characteristics. More
specifically, we show that packet reordering is asymmetric as well as temporal and
site-dependent, packet size does influence the likelihood of reordering, that there
exists a time-of-the-day dependency, and reordering primarily exists at two
time-scales (a few milliseconds or multiple tens of milliseconds.)
