English

Why Does Flow Director Cause Packet Reordering?

Networking and Internet Architecture 2011-06-06 v1

Abstract

Intel Ethernet Flow Director is an advanced network interface card (NIC) technology. It provides the benefits of parallel receive processing in multiprocessing environments and can automatically steer incoming network data to the same core on which its application process resides. However, our analysis and experiments show that Flow Director cannot guarantee in-order packet delivery in multiprocessing environments. Packet reordering causes various negative impacts. E.g., TCP performs poorly with severe packet reordering. In this paper, we use a simplified model to analyze why Flow Director can cause packet reordering. Our experiments verify our analysis.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1106.0443,
  title  = {Why Does Flow Director Cause Packet Reordering?},
  author = {Wenji Wu and Phil DeMar and Matt Crawford},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.0443},
  year   = {2011}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:16:46.307Z