A comparative simulation study of deterministic and stochastic strategies for reduction of packet reordering in multipath data streaming

Multipath routing gains clear network performance advantages for data streaming in networked systems with high path diversity. The level of packet reordering, however, becomes higher: distant packets are reordered, the application performance is reduced due to head-of-line blocking at the destination, and a large resequencing buffer is needed for sorting incoming packets. In this paper, we study by simulation the stochastic compensation effect to reduce packet reordering. If a source randomizes packet scheduling into multiple paths of random transmission delays, then these two sides of randomness “quench” each other. We perform comparison experiments to test this hypothesis in various multipath configurations, focusing on deterministic vs. randomized strategies of packet scheduling. The experiments confirm the existence of the stochastic compensation effect and its considerable influence on the application performance.