A New Initialization Mechanism for SCTP Association between Two Multihomed Terminals

In the existing SCTP, an association is established by exchanging four initial chunks during four-way handshakes. What is serious is that the association establishment phase has to be backed off exponentially once any initial chunk gets lost or suffers random bit errors. This will result in a severe performance degradation of SCTP over wireless networks due to a very long waiting time. In order to make a robust initialization mechanism of SCTP in wireless networks, we introduce a simply but novel method to quickly setup an association between two multihomed SCTP terminals. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can avoid the failure of association establishment under wireless network with high bit error rate and/or high packet loss rate.