IPCC-SCTP: an enhancement to the standard SCTP to support multi-homing efficiently

With the popularity of multi-homed hosts, which can be reached through multiple paths, a new challenge arises on how to efficiently and simultaneously use multiple paths between multi-homed communication hosts to explore potential benefits of multi-homing feature, such as to improve connection reliability, to increase throughput etc. Standard SCTP cannot support the multi-homing feature efficiently due to its per association congestion control structure. Per association congestion control structure makes it unfeasible to extend standard SCTP for load sharing, load balancing and other multi-homing applications. In this paper, we identified and analyzed limitations of the congestion control mechanism of standard SCTP in the context of using multiple paths simultaneously. We proposed an independent per path congestion control principle for standard SCTP to overcome these limitations. Algorithms are provided to realize independent per path congestion control in standard SCTP without modifying SCTP DATA chunk format and without introducing overhead to the network. SCTP with independent per path congestion control not only overcomes existing flaws of standard SCTP in supporting the multi-homing feature but also demonstrates its applicability to various multi-homing applications.