Packet Reordering Metrics

1
 Reordered Packets.
• Percentage of reordered packets was used as a measure to evaluate reorder.
• No uniform definition.
• Consider two packet sequences a. (1,2,4,5,3) and b. (1,2,5,4,3)
• Packet reorder can be interpreted in following ways.
• Packet 3, 4, 5 are out of order in both cases (a) and (b).
• Packet 3 is the only out of order packet in (a) and packet 4, 5 are out of order
in (b).
• Packet 3 and 4 are out of order in both cases.
• No precise definition evident from the examples.
• Several metrics presented for measuring reordering.

2
 Reorder Density.
• Reorder density measures both the amount and extent of reordering of
packets.
• Consider a sequence of packets (1,2, .. N).
• Receive Index is assigned (1,2,..N) is assigned to each non duplicate
packet arriving at the receiver.
• Receive index value skips the sequence number for a lost packet.

1
1
2 2 1
Packet 3 lost and
3 packet 5 and 4 2
5
4 reordered
5 4 4
3 5
Incoming Packets

3
 Reorder Density.
• For a reorder event receive index assigned to packet m is r(m + dm).
• Packet reordering is represented by union of all reorder events.
• Reorder Density is the histogram of dm values normalized w.r.t to total number of
packets.
• RD uses the displacement threshold values as a reference to consider packet lost.
• Displacement threshold is also used to identify the duplicates (packet should arrive
within DT arrivals).

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 Real Time RD
Go back DT (DT = 3)
• Packet was supposed to arrive DT places ago.
• As a result new receive index are calculated.
6 5 4 2 1

3 6 5 4 2 1
New receive index value 5 4 3 2 1
assigned
New Receive index
6 5 4 2 1 value and hence new
displacement.
Packet 3
considered lost
after arriving
of packet 6

Stay Back DT
• The evaluation lags behind DT packets.
• Receive index I is not assigned until DT more packets arrive.

5
Reorder Metrics
Capture Reordering
• RD captures both early and late packets along with their extent.
• Packet 7 has -2 displacement indicating early arrival whereas packet
5, 6 has 1 displacement each indicating late arrivals.

6
 Reorder Buffer-Occupancy Density
• Hypothetical buffer used for recovery from out of order arrival of packets.
• Occupancy Density of buffer RBD is a measure of reordering.
• For a arriving packet sequence (1,2,3,4,7,5,6,8) we have

• Buffer Occupancy is 1 because packet 7 arrived when packet 5

was supposed to arrive.
• To detect duplicates the arriving packet is compared with
expected sequence number or with the contents of buffer.
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 Reordering Extent
• Reordering extent is a lateness based metrics.
• Reordering extent is the maximum distance in packets from a late
packet to the earliest packet received that has a larger sequence.
• Consider the arrival of packet with sequence s[i]=5 and therefore
i=6 .
• Now we select a j (1<j<i) such that, s[j]>s[i].
• Value of j for which s[j]>s[i] is 5.
• Reordering extent = i - j

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 Application
TCP Flow Control
• Lateness Displacement from RD can be used to adjust the
value of ‘dupthresh’ parameter in TCP.
Buffer and Resource Allocation
• RBD emulates packets back in sequence and hence can be
used for buffer estimation.
• Reordering extent ‘e’ is used in estimation of buffer size.
Network Diagnosis
• Packet reordering caused due to error and faults in the node
could be detected by measuring the displacement field in RD.