SHOP: An Integrated Scheme for SCTP Handover Optimization in Multihomed Environments

Multihoming feature enables stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) to be a handover and mobility scheme for mobile users in multihomed environment. However, there are two flaws deteriorating SCTP handover performance. First, the congestion control mechanism of SCTP makes entire association experience a slow-start phase after handover, thus leading to a sudden-shrink of throughput. Second, the diversity of round-trip time (RTT) between separate paths incurs packet reordering and likely to trigger the spurious fast-retransmit, which degrades performance of reliable transport, too. This paper presents SHOP: an integrated scheme for SCTP handover optimization. By means of available bandwidth estimation technologies, SHOP avoids the slow-start phase after handover through configuring proper congestion control variables of new primary path. Meanwhile, postpone-handover based on RTT measurement is put forward in SHOP to minimize the negative effects of packet reordering. Detailed simulation results show the effectiveness of proposed scheme.