Decoupling path failure detection from congestion control to improve SCTP failovers

SCTP handover is too slow to be useful as a mobility solution for most applications. With quicker handovers, SCTP will be an interesting solution to mobility. SCTP uses retransmissions as probes for path failure detection. Congestion control forces slow paced retransmissions but quick failovers need fast paced probes. Our solution is to stop using retransmissions as probes. Instead, we propose active path monitoring using unreliable heartbeats. Applications can tune this algorithm to meet their own requirements. We show data from a simple experiment in a real environment.