Optimising transmission path selection in SCTP based wireless networking

Abstract

A number of different protocols have been proposed to support the concept of wireless terminal mobility. One such protocol is SCTP which includes functionality to monitor the characteristics of the primary path and all alternate secondary paths connecting two hosts. This supports a basic mechanism by which traffic can be switched from a primary path to a secondary path in the case of a primary path failure. This paper focuses on further enhancing this functionality to support switching between the available paths in order to optimise the overall data throughput between the hosts. A number of alternate algorithms are proposed to control this mechanism and the performance of these algorithms has been evaluated in a simulated network environment. The results of these simulations show that they can offer a superior performance as quantified in terms of mean handover rates and handover latency compared to the current SCTP standard algorithm and a previously suggested solution. It is shown that the proposed algorithms results in a reduction in the mean handover rate to approximately 4% of the mean handover rate of existing suggested handover control algorithms.