the same order must be employed at this node to recover a proper sequence of cells both nodes must be aware of the round robin order which is to be employed upon initialization therefore both imas send a series of special cells e g sequence number cells in round robin fashion over the links e g t1 e1 links this allows the receiver ima at both nodes to establish the sequence in which to read cells from the incoming links as well as to adjust relative link delay links within an ima link group may have different delays which may also vary in time thus cells transmitted in a given order may not be received in the same order at the far end in fact a cell may be received significantly later than another cell that followed it in the original cell streams the receiving ima device must preserve cell order to do this it buffers cells received on each link and compensates for the differential delays prior to recombining the cells into the single stream the term link delay synchronization lds is used to indicate that a receive link 39 s differential delay relative to its peers in the ima link group has been measured and compensated for in the process of ima group startup while establishing communication with the far end node the ima measured the differential delay of the receive links if a link 39 s differential delay is within a specified maximum the link is declared to be in lds and it can be accepted as an active member of the link group if the link 39 s differential delay exceeds the specified maximum the link is not in lds and is rejected as an active member.