draft-smith-quic-receive-ts and packet reordering

[Chris Box <[e-mail]>]

Hi.

In another thread, Greg flagged the draft on robustness to packet
reordering:

On Wed, 12 Mar 2025 at 02:46, Greg White <g.white=
[e-mail]> wrote:

> The current WIP can be found at:
> https://gwhitecl.github.io/draft-white-intarea-reordering/draft-white-intarea-reordering.html
>

I think this is a great start on describing a widespread performance issue
with common layer 2 networks.

In today's meeting we saw large support (32 for, 0 against) for working on
ACK receive timestamps. Clearly such timestamps would be a useful tool for
senders to be able to handle such networks better, if sent at high
frequency. But the timestamp capability really ought to support reordering.

Why? My overall takeaway from the reordering draft is that many links have
tended to go to great lengths to shuffle packets back into the original
sequence before delivering them to the endpoint. This protects the
throughput of old TCP stacks, but at the cost of tens to hundreds of
milliseconds of jitter. If we're able to successfully move the dial towards
less resequencing, it implies draft-smith-quic-receive-ts
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-smith-quic-receive-ts/> should
support out of order packets well.

Chris