On the influence of resequencing on the regularity of service

The purpose of this paper is to study how resequencing packets in a communication network may affect the performance of the application needing the information. We analyze a simple queueing model where customers may be randomly disordered, before arriving at a single server queue. The performance index chosen is the variance of the server waiting time, which is a measure of the `jitterʹ suffered by the application. The analysis reveals that not resequencing customers does improve the service regularity for a wide range of loss probabilities and service times. It shows also that, contrary to the conclusions of previous analyses, resequencing does not necessarily make the performance of the system worse.