Monday, July 21, 2014

Out of order packets

IP protocol by nature does not guarantee packet delivery in the order in which they were sent, this is a common behavior since we can’t control the entire path of a packet when traversing different carrier’s networks/Paths.

In principle, applications that use a transport protocol such as TCP or SCTP don't have to worry about packet reordering, because the transport protocol is responsible for reassembling the byte stream  into the original ordering. However, reordering can have a severe performance impact on some implementations of TCP.

Real-time media applications such as audio/video conferencing tools often experience problems when run over networks that reorder packets. This is somewhat remarkable in that all of these applications have jitter buffers to eliminate the effects of delay variation on the real-time media streams.

Notes: Packet reordering can lead to retransmissions, delays, and even connection timeouts.

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