A Packet Resequencing Protocol for Fault-Tolerant Multipath Transmission with non-uniform Traffic Splitting

In this paper, an issue of packet resequencing in an asynchronous inverse multiplexing switching system is examined. Such system is characterized by non-uniform nominal traffic splitting weights, variable path bandwidths, large variable delays, and possibility of packet loss. After examining the conventional packet reordering techniques, which have been developed both for point-to-point and switching environment, we point out their limitations and propose a novel resequencing protocol based on the notion of rank. It relies on conveying information on the relative ordering of the available switching paths, rather than absolute packet order, and for the fixed number of paths allows to use limited control overhead to successfully handle arbitrarily large transmission delays and path exclusion periods. The properties of the rank-based enumeration and resequencing are discussed, and the operations of the ingress and egress controllers are described.