Packet Reordering Metrics: Some Methodological Considerations

  • Authors:

  • Gabriel Istrate;Anders Hansson;Guanhua Yan

  • Affiliations:

  • Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM

  • Venue:
  • ICNS '06 Proceedings of the International conference on Networking and Services
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Characterizing what makes a packet reordering metric meaningful is a problem that has attracted significant interest, but it still lacks a universally accepted solution. We contribute to this discussion by investigating some theoretical concepts that make the following simple intuitions precise: - A metric that is inconsistent, i.e., gives different values on two similar TCP traces, should not be regarded as useful. - We formalize the notion of two traces being "identical modulo unimportant details" using similarity relations. - If "real-life" traces differ from random sequences by always satisfying certain reorder invariants, then we should only use traces satisfying these invariants when investigating the consistency of a reordering metric. We illustrate these concepts in the context of Restored, an approach to semantic compression of TCP traces [10]. In particular, we discuss the consistency of two metrics defined by Jayasumana et al. [1, 12] with respect to the similarity notions defined in [8, 9, 10].