SCTP Extension for EGPRS/WLAN Handover Data

Multistreaming and multihoming SCTP features give better performance than TCP for the transport of signaling in wired networks. More recently, some solutions have been defined for wireless environment (Xing et al., 2002), mobile SCTP (mSCTP) is a wireless extension that was proposed to take benefit from the multihoming feature for hand off. In this paper we use SCTP´s multihoming feature and define a new type of control chunk in order to retrieve radio information from mobile and to use this information to improve the performance of SCTP in handoff situation. We propose modifications of the SCTP congestion control algorithms to take into account information sent by mobile to the network (GGSN) via QoS_Measurement_Chunk. This new mechanism is useful to perform inter RAT handover for data. The example studied here is between EGPRS and WLAN. The results obtained are compared with the standard SCTP and present an improvement of performance especially in terms of throughput