A Review of Multihoming Issues Using the Stream Control Transmission Protocol

Known as multihoming, devices with more than one network interface can enhance their performance capabilities by harnessing unused resources from alternative access networks. Whether it´s improved reliability or sheer throughput potential, network devices will benefit from a multihomed framework. Unfortunately, our current means of guaranteeing reliability while maintaining quality control, specifically, the transmission control protocol (TCP), does not support multihoming. Despite the latter, a relatively young transport layer standard called the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP), incorporates multihoming into its design. In this paper, we investigate state-of-the-art multihoming techniques using SCTP. A comprehensive survey of developments has brought forth three main research areas, namely: handover management, concurrent multipath transfer (CMT), and cross-layer activities. While the presented algorithms may offer sufficient results, many open problems still remain.