SCTP over High Speed Wide Area Networks

Abstract

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a reliable transport protocol to tackle the limitations of TCP and UDP. SCTP was originally designed to transport PSTN signaling messages over IP networks, but is also capable of serving as a general-purpose transport protocol. SCTP provides attractive features such as multi-streaming and multi-homing that may be helpful in high-mobility environment. SCTP congestion control mechanisms are based upon TCP congestion principals with the exception of the fast recovery algorithm. Original SCTP congestion control can perform badly in high-speed wide area networks because of its slow response with large congestion window. We proposed a new congestion control scheme based on the simple congestion window modification for SCTP to improve its performance in high-speed wide area networks. The results of several experiments we performed proved that our new suggested congestion control scheme for SCTP in high-speed network improved the throughput of the original SCTP congestion control scheme significantly.