Bandwidth aggregation in stream control transmission protocol

In this paper, we address various aspects related to extending and engineering stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) to utilize its multi-homing support for simultaneous transmission of data chunks on different path, while maintaining the congestion control on each path to ensure fair integration with other traffic in the network. The extended SCTP, referred to as load sharing-SCTP (LS-SCTP), is able to aggregate the bandwidth of all the active transmission paths between the communicating endpoints. It monitors the paths, and accordingly chooses the paths that are suitable for load sharing. In addition, LS-SCTP retransmission mechanism accelerates the delivery of missing data to the receiver to prevent stalling the transport connection while waiting for missing data chunks. Simulation results show that LS-SCTP is extremely beneficial for networks with limited bandwidth and failure prone links.