SCTP-Based Bandwidth Aggregation across Heterogeneous Networks

Nowadays more and more various networks can be used to access the Internet. But a lot of them, especially most wireless networks, only offer very limited bandwidth to the end users. In order to gain much wider bandwidth than one network can offer, we modified the stream control transport protocol (SCTP) so that it can aggregate bandwidth over multiple interfaces of a host to serve an application simultaneously. The main algorithms proposed by us include virtual association, compound congestion control window and mechanisms of transferring and retransferring packets. We also simulated our solution by the open source software Net Simulator version 2 (NS-2), the results show that the efficiency of our solution is over 80% in terms of bandwidth utilization. We still discussed the future studies that have to do before the modification can be used in real more complex topologies networks.