Multipath routing and the ability to simultaneously use multiple network paths has long been proposed as a means for meeting the reliability and performance improvement goals of a next generation Internet. However, its use causes out-of-order packet delivery, which is well known to hinder TCP performance. While next-generation transport protocols will no doubt better cope with this phenomenon, a complete switch to these new protocols cannot be made on all devices "overnight"; the reality is that we will he forced to continue using TCP on such multipath networks well after deployment of a future Internet is complete. In this paper, we investigate the use of best-effort packet reordering an optional network layer service for improving the performance of any TCP session in the presence of out-of-order packet delivery. Such a service holds the promise of allowing unmodified TCP to take advantage of the reliability and performance gains offered by a future multipath-enabled Internet without suffering the adverse performance effects commonly associated with out-of-order packet delivery. Our experiments test the performance of two common TCP variants under packet dispersion with differing numbers of paths and amounts of inter-path latency variance. They were conducted using multi path network and packet reorderer implementations implemented within the Emulab testbed. Our results demonstrate that a simple best-effort reordering service can insulate TCP from the type of reordering that might be expected from use of packet dispersion over disjoint paths in a wide-area network, and is capable of providing significant performance benefits with few ill side-effects.
