MPSCTP: A multipath variant of SCTP and its performance comparison with other multipath protocols

Multipath protocols have great potential to improve error resilience and utilization of scarce network resources. In 2000, IETF introduced Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) for multihomed transport. Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) and Multipath SCTP (MPSCTP) were proposed as extensions of SCTP to support concurrent usage of available paths. Our original MPSCTP proposal assumes that all the paths between the source and the destination are disjoint and there is no acknowledgement loss in the reverse direction. In this paper we propose a generalized version of the MPSCTP protocol where these assumptions are relaxed. We also present a comparative study of the performance of MPSCTP with CMT and MPTCP, a multipath variant of TCP, in different network scenarios using ns-2 based simulations.