A simulation-based study of FAST TCP compared to SCTP: Towards multihoming implementation using FAST TCP

The current multihome-aware protocols (like stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) or parallel TCP for concurrent multipath data transfer (CMT) are not designed for high-capacity and large-latency networks; they often have performance problems transferring large data files over shared long-distance wide area networks. It has been shown that SCTP-CMT is more sensitive to receive buffer (rbuf) constraints, and this rbuf-blocking problem causes considerable throughput loss when multiple paths are used simultaneously. In this research paper, we demonstrate the weakness of SCTP-CMT rbuf constraints, and we then identify that rbuf-blocking problem in SCTP multihoming is mostly due to its loss-based nature for detecting network congestion. We present a simulation-based performance comparison of FAST TCP versus SCTP in high-speed networks for solving a number of throughput issues. This work proposes an end-to-end transport layer protocol (i.e., FAST TCP multihoming as a reliable, delay-based, multihome-aware, and selective ACK-based transport protocol), which can transfer data between a multihomed source and destination hosts through multiple paths simultaneously. Through extensive ns-2 simulations, we show that FAST TCP multihoming achieves the desired goals under a variety of network conditions. The experimental results and survey presented in this research also provide an insight on design decisions for the future high-speed multihomed transport layer protocols.