A Hierarchical Checksum Scheme for SCTP over Wireless Networks with Worse Channel Condition

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) uses an overall checksum scheme for each segment, by which a corrupted packet will be regarded as a lost one. This may result in degradation of SCTP´s throughput performance over wireless networks. This paper proposes a hierarchical checksum scheme for SCTP, in which several checksum fields are distributed within a segment for different coverages. The main purpose is to extract the available payload from a corrupted packet and to deliver those in-order data to the upper layer in time so as to reduce the retransmission amount as much as possible. Simulation results show that the performance gain of the proposed scheme could be prominent in the wireless environments with high packet corruption rate, compared to the standard SCTP.