Evaluation of Multipath Transmission using the Stream Control Transmission Protocol

Abstract

Concurrent Multipath Transfer using the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (CMT-SCTP) enables multi-interface devices to send and receive data at the same time over more than one path. However, because of the fair Round robin scheduling, the paths with longer delay (low quality) causes the performance degradation due to gathered outstanding data at receiver. The outstanding data are the data packets sent by the sender for which it is waiting for an acknowledgment. In networks with dissimilar paths, the blockage in the buffer space at the receiver side is also one of the side effects of large outstanding data. This paper presents an evaluation study on the multipath transmission using the SCTP, particularly the techniques that deal with the outstanding data. A simulation scenario is proposed that contains multiple paths from the source to destination, where each path differs with the other path by the propagation delay. The results of evaluation show that the technique that uses the outstanding data in the packet scheduling decision (CMT-OUT) increase the data transmission over multiple paths when it is compared to the CMT-SCTP.