Reorder Notifying TCP (RN-TCP) with explicit packet drop notification

Abstract. Numerous studies have shown that packet reordering is com-mon, especially in networks where there is high degree of parallelism and different link speeds. Reordering of packets decreases the TCP perfor-mance of a network, mainly because it leads to overestimation of the congestion of the network. We consider wired networks and analyze the performance of such networks when reordering of packets occurs. We propose a proactive solution that could significantly improve the per-formance of the network when reordering of packets occurs. We report results of our simulation experiments, which support this claim. Our so-lution is based on enabling the senders to distinguished between dropped packets and reordered packets.