Sorting Reordered Packets with Interrupt Coalescing

TL;DR

This paper introduces SRPIC, a novel method that leverages interrupt coalescing in network device drivers to sort reordered TCP packets, significantly reducing reordering issues and improving network performance.

Contribution

The paper proposes SRPIC, a new strategy that sorts TCP packets within the network device driver using interrupt coalescing, addressing packet reordering efficiently.

Findings

SRPIC effectively reduces TCP packet reordering.

SRPIC improves network performance in reordering-prone environments.

Experimental results confirm SRPIC's efficiency against forward-path reordering.

Abstract

TCP performs poorly in networks with serious packet reordering. Processing reordered packets in the TCP layer is costly and inefficient, involving interaction of the sender and receiver. Motivated by the interrupt coalescing mechanism that delivers packets upward for protocol processing in blocks, we propose a new strategy, Sorting Reordered Packets with Interrupt Coalescing (SRPIC), to reduce packet reordering in the receiver. SRPIC works in the network device driver; it makes use of the interrupt coalescing mechanism to sort the reordered packets belonging to the same TCP stream in a block of packets before delivering them upward; each sorted block is internally ordered. Experiments have proven the effectiveness of SRPIC against forward-path reordering.