In-network Support for Packet Reordering for Multiaccess Transport Layer Tunneling

Networked systems have recently aimed to use multiple access networks in parallel to increase resiliency, availability and capacity. However, different paths may have different latency characteristics, which may lead to out-of-order packet delivery. This may severely impact both the end-to-end application performance and the capacity utilisation of multiaccess systems. In this paper, we show that in-network support for packet reordering for multiaccess systems that are based on multiple transport layer tunnels is beneficial for several application types. Our findings are applicable to TCP and QUIC traffic in the 3GPP ATSSS context, where we use the MP-DCCP tunneling framework with a buffer-based packet reordering approach that uses a dynamic timing threshold to cope with variation of path delays over time. We demonstrate achievable performance gains for a wide range of path latency differences and end-to-end round trip times when using different in-network reordering algorithms.