A.E.A. Ahmed, T. Saadawi, and M. Lee (USA)
Mobile Wireless Networks; Stream Control Transmission Protocol; Bandwidth Aggregation; Multi-homing
Due to the limited and variable bandwidth of the wireless channels, as well as their lossy and break prone nature, the performance of mobile applications can be greatly hurt. Currently, each application data stream is limited to use only one communication channel. In this paper we present a transport layer solution for bandwidth aggregation, based on extending Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). The extended SCTP, which we refer to as Load-Sharing SCTP (LS-SCTP), is able to aggregate the bandwidth of the transmission paths between the communicating endpoints. In addition, according to the availability of the transmission paths, LS-SCTP can dynamically add/drop paths. As failure or increase in the loss rate of a path can stall the bundle, LS SCTP includes path monitoring and packet assignment mechanisms. These mechanisms monitor the paths and stripe the packets according to their condition. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism in providing throughput and reliability to mobile applications.
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