TCP performs poorly in networks with serious packet reordering. Processing
reordered packets in the TCP layer is costly and inefficient, involving
interaction of the sender and receiver. Motivated by the interrupt coalescing
mechanism that delivers packets upward for protocol processing in blocks, we
propose a new strategy, Sorting Reordered Packets with Interrupt Coalescing
(SRPIC), to reduce packet reordering in the receiver. SRPIC works in the
network device driver; it makes use of the interrupt coalescing mechanism to
sort the reordered packets belonging to the same TCP stream in a block of
packets before delivering them upward; each sorted block is internally ordered.
Experiments have proven the effectiveness of SRPIC against forward-path
reordering.