A Multilink Protocol with the Per Flow Resequencing and Its Performance Evaluation

Procedures that provide a virtual link service aggregating bandwidths of multiple physical links are called a multilink protocol. The multilink protocol enables to utilize bandwidths of multiple links flexibly and to improve reliability of communications. This paper focuses on the resequencing function needed to preserve packet sequence integrity. The resequencing is generally performed by both each link layer protocol as well as the multilink protocol. This paper shows that a problem of the head of line (HOL) blocking occurs due to the resequencing if packets of multiple IP flows are transferred over the multilink connection. To solve this problem, this paper proposes the Per- Flow ReSequencing (PFRS) scheme for the multilink protocol and evaluates its effectiveness through analysis and simulations.