On Concurrent Multipath Transfer in SCTP-Based Handover Scenarios

Handling mobility at the transport layer is a promising approach to achieve seamless handover in the context of heterogeneous wireless access networks. In particular, features such as multihoming and dynamic address reconfiguration provided by mobile SCTP (mSCTP) protocol are among the key enablers for handover support at the transport layer. This paper investigates the applicability of concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) to distribute data among two end-to-end paths of an mSCTP association during the handover transition process. To that end, the principles of the mSCTP-CMT design are given, emphasizing the consequences of a sender-introduced reordering and its effect on congestion control. The proposed mSCTP-CMT handover scheme is benchmarked with two other handover schemes, namely mSCTP and SCTP failover-based. Provided analysis indicates the possible application area of mSCTP-CMT, taking into account not only handover scenario parameters (dwelling time, available bandwidth ratio and round-trip time), but also an important design constraint: receiver buffer (rbuf) size. Rbuf size proves to be a major limiting factor shrinking significantly, yet not excluding mSCTP-CMT´s application scope.