On the influence of resequencing on the regularity of service

The purpose of this paper is to study how resequencing packets in a communi cation network may affect the performance of the application needing the in formation. We analyze a simple queueing model where customers may be random ly disordered, before arriving at a single server queue. The performance in dex chosen is the variance of the server waiting time, which is a measure o f the 'jitter' suffered by the application. The analysis reveals that not r esequencing customers does improve the service regularity for a wide range of loss probabilities and service times. It shows also that, contrary to th e conclusions of previous analyses, resequencing does not necessarily make the performance of the system worse. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.