Emulation Support for Advanced Packet Reordering Models

From being regarded as a pathological event, packet reordering is now considered to be naturally prevalent within the Internet. When packets are reordered, the performance of transport protocols like TCP can be severely hurt. To overcome performance problems a number of mitigations have been proposed. Common for most proposals is, however, the lack of evaluations using real protocol implementations and good models of packet reordering. In this paper we highlight the need for detailed reordering models, and implement support for such models in the KauNet network emulator. To demonstrate the importance of using detailed models we present an experimental example.