Rondo: Controlling Reordering in High-Throughput Packet Spraying

Abstract

Modern datacenter applications demand high network bandwidth, motivating packet-level multipath transport to exploit the aggregate capacity of multiple paths. However, packet reordering under packet spraying poses challenges for hardware transports. Excessive packet reordering makes it difficult to infer packet loss, imposes substantial pressure on NIC resources, and ultimately degrades performance. Existing transports either prioritize throughput without controlling packet reordering, or mitigate reordering by restricting transmissions, which leaves available path capacity unused. In this paper, we identify two fundamental sources of packet reordering: transient inter-path queueing differences caused by control dynamics, and persistent path-delay differences due to path heterogeneity. These observations motivate a joint design of a multipath controller and a packet scheduler to address transient and persistent delay differences, respectively. We present Rondo, a packet-level multipath transport that achieves both high throughput and low packet reordering. Its multipath controller uses ACK-based per-path capacity estimation and probing to maintain stable path loads, while its packet scheduler adjusts packet transmission order to compensate for persistent delay differences. Testbed experiments and large-scale simulations show that Rondo reduces the maximum out-of-order degree by up to 97.5% while maintaining high throughput. With constrained receiver buffers, Rondo achieves up to 8.51 times higher goodput.