Reordering of Packets due to Multipath Forwarding - An Analysis

Increased parallelism in routers necessary to handle high link speeds and large routing tables, wireless ad hoc routing, QoS provisioning, and overlay routing, are some of the factors that lead to an increase in reordering on the Internet. Packet reordering due to packet forwarding over multiple paths is investigated. An analytical model is derived for load splitting scenarios and verified using emulated topologies. The resulting reordering is profiled using reorder density, and analyzed with respect to path delays, path probabilities and number of paths. The variation of packet displacement with delay variation and forwarding probabilities is quantified. The special case corresponding to two paths is evaluated in detail. For any load splitting, the increase in the difference in the delay between paths leads to increased reordering, making the paths with closer delay values more preferable. The model can also be applied to a single-path case where reordering is caused by wide delay variation among packets, by deriving an equivalent set of probabilities corresponding to path splitting scenario.