On the Packet Reordering of mSCTP for Vertical Handover in Heterogneous Wireless Networks

This paper deals with the packet reordering problem of the mobile stream control transmission protocol (mSCTP) for vertical handover in heterogeneous wireless networks, in which might occur due to the discrepancy of link bandwidth and transmission delay when MN switches its primary path into a new path with different characteristics such as link bandwidth and transmission delay. This packet reordering problem tends to induce spurious fast retransmissions and unnecessary reduction of the congestion window in the mSCTP vertical handover. To solve this problem, we propose a simple and novel scheme in which the correspondent node (CN) will retransmit the outstanding data chunks just before transmission of the newly generated data chunks over the new primary address. From the simulation results, we can see the proposed scheme could significantly improve the transmission performance during handover, compared with the existing mSCTP handover scheme, by avoiding spurious fast retransmission and unnecessary reduction of the congestion window.