End-point synchronisation and handover for multi-homed services

It is proposed to implement a synchronised routing table at the transport layer, referred to as an association routing table (ART), to improve the performance of multi-homed transport protocols. An algorithm is described that ensures that the routing tables can be synchronised, which is then used to implement a handover mechanism. The ART is implemented within the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP). It is shown that by using a synchronised ART, it is possible to implement failover in cases where the standard SCTP cannot do so, Configurations are more resilient to network errors, and it is possible to perform a handover without any network support