A Simulation Study of the Stochastic Compensation Effect for Packet Reordering in Multipath Data Streaming

Abstract

Multipath routing gains clear network performance advantages for data streaming. 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 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 simulation experiments to test this hypothesis in various multipath configurations and compare deterministic vs. Randomized scheduling. The experiments show the existence of the stochastic compensation effect and its considerable influence on the application performance.