On Mar 26, 2011, at 4:43 AM, Andrew Hood wrote:
> TCP traffic is allowed to arrive out of order. The OS stack will
> reassemble it in the correct order.
>
> With other traffic it has always been the application's problem to deal
> with out of order data. The OS stack may have to deal with reassembling
> fragments.
I.e., the service offered by most if not all LANs, as well as by PPP, doesn't guarantee in-order delivery of packets, so, for most if not all network technologies, there's no harm in not guaranteeing that packets are handed to the network stack in the order that they were received by the network adapter.
