Quality-Aware SCTP in Wireless Networks

Abstract

SCTP (Stream control transmission protocol) is a new transport layer protocol that was published as RFC2960 by IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force) in October 2000 and amended in RFC4960 in September 2007. SCTP provides reliable ordered and unordered transport services. The congestion control and flow control mechanisms for SCTP are very similar to those for TCP (transmission control protocol). SCTP can apply more than one IP address when establishing associations. SCTP multihoming can support multiple paths in association. These features provide SCTP with some network-level fault tolerance through network address redundancy. SCTP multihoming has tremendous transmission potential. However, SCTP path management is very simple in RFC4960 and therefore cannot effectively distinguish path conditions; it also has no path switch strategy appropriate for wireless networking. These factors all degrade SCTP performance. This study proposes a new path management (quality-aware SCTP) for wireless networks; this includes a new path failure detection method and ICE (idle path congestion window size estimation) mechanism. An experiment using NS2 was performed, showing that quality-aware SCTP can effectively improve the network performance. Quality-aware SCTP is simple and provides a more effective performance than SCTP alone.