A resequencing model for high-speed packet-switching networks

In this paper, we propose a framework to study the resequencing mechanism in high-speed networks. This framework allows us to estimate the packet resequencing delay and the resequencing buffer occupancy distributions when data traffic is dispersed on multiple disjoint paths. In contrast to most existing work, the end-to-end path delay distribution is decoupled from the resequencing model. Thus, once the end-to-end path delay distribution is obtained, such as from historical data, our model may be used. In this paper, we illustrate our proposed model with Gaussian distributed path delays. Our results show that the packet resequencing delay and the resequencing buffer occupancy drop when the traffic is spread over a larger number of homogeneous paths, although the network performance improvement quickly saturates when the number of paths increases. We find that the number of paths used in multipath routing should be small, say, up to three.