Counting preimages of TCP reordering patterns Original Research Article

Packet reordering is an important property of network traffic that should be captured by analytical models of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). We study a combinatorial problem motivated by Restored [G. Istrate, A. Hansson, S. Thulasidasan, M. Marathe, C. Barrett, Semantic compression of TCP traces, in: F. Boavida (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth IFIP NETWORKING Conference, in: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3976, Springer-Verlag, 2006, pp. 123–135], a TCP modeling methodology that incorporates information about packet dynamics. A significant component of this model is a many-to-one mapping image that transforms sequences of packet IDs into buffer sequences in a manner that is compatible with TCP semantics. We obtain the following results: