Impact of Slow Start on SCTP Handover Performance

The rapidly growing interest in untethered Internet connections, especially in terms of WLAN and 3G/4G mobile connections, calls for intelligent session management: a mobile device should be able to provide a reasonable end-user experience despite location changes, disconnection periods and, not least, handovers. As part of an effort to develop a SCTP-based session management framework that meets these criteria, we are studying ways of improving the SCTP handover delay for real-time traffic; especially the startup delay on the connection between a mobile device and the target access point. To obtain an appreciation of the theoretically feasible gains of optimizing the startup delay on the handover-target path, we have developed a model that predicts the transfer times of SCTP messages during slow start. This paper experimentally validates our model and demonstrates that it could be used to predict the message transfer times in a variable bitrate flow by approximating the variable flow with a constant dito. It also employs our model to obtain an appreciation of the startup delay penalties incured by slow start during handovers in typical mobile, real-time traffic scenarios.