Influence of Packet Reordering on Concurrent Multipath Transmissions for Transport Virtualization

From the viewpoint of communication networks Network Virtualization (NV) extends beyond pure operational issues and addresses many of the impasses of the current Internet. The idea of Transport Virtualization (TV) progresses the capabilities of NV and enables the independence from a specific network transport resource. The independence is achieved by pooling multiple transport resources and selecting the best resources for exclusive or concurrent use. However, the application and selection of concurrent paths is rather complex and introduces inevitable packet re-ordering due to different stochastic delay characteristics on the used paths. Packets arriving at the destination out-of-order have to be stored in a resequencing buffer before reassembled packets are forwarded to the application. Therefore we perform an analysis of the fundamental behaviors and factors for packet re-ordering in concurrent multipath transmissions. This analysis applies analytical and simulative techniques which are used to compute the buffer occupancy probability distribution.