Research on the Extension of SCTP Protocol on the Heterogeneous Wireless Network

As a promising candidate of general-purpose transport layer protocol, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has its new features such as multi-homing and multi-streaming. SCTP association can make concurrent multi-path transfer an appealing candidate to satisfy the ever increasing user demands for bandwidth by using Multi-homing feature. And multiple streams provide an aggregation mechanism to accommodate heterogeneous objects, which belong to the same application but may require different QoS from the network. In this paper, the authors introduce WM2-SCTP (Wireless Multi-path Multi-flow - Stream Control Transmission Protocol), a transport layer solution for concurrent multi-path transfer with parallel sub-flows. WM2-SCTP aims at exploiting SCTP's multi-homing and multi-streaming capability by grouping SCTP streams into sub-flows based on their required QoS and selecting best paths for each sub-flow to improve data transfer rates. The results show that under different scenarios WM2-SCTP is able to support QoS among the SCTP stream, and it achieves a better throughput.