IP packet interleaving: bridging the gap between theory and practice

The bursty nature of losses over the Internet is constantly asking for effective solutions. Packet interleaving or time diversity allows to cope with loss burstiness, at the cost of an additional delay. In this work, after determining the loss burstiness degree of real networks, we implement a real interleaver (we called TimeD), and we tackle the problem of how to apply such a transmission schema to UDP flows in real networks. For this aim, we propose a methodology composed of the following steps: (i) firstly, we develop a simulator to study the potential benefits of TimeD, understanding its loss decorrelation power and determining the interleaving configurations most suited to different network conditions and loss burstiness degree; (ii) then, using an emulated network, we validate TimeD and derive important operating parameters; (iii) finally, we study TimeD over a real satellite network. Thanks to this multifarious analysis we are able to move step-by-step from the theory to the practice, showing how it is possible - using TimeD - to actually decorrelate bursty losses and increase the performance of real applications.