SCTP-based Transport Protocols for Concurrent Multipath Transfer

The growing availability of multiple network interfaces on mobile devices makes concurrent multipath transfer an appealing candidate to satisfy the ever increasing user demand for bandwidth. As of today, the only transport protocol supporting multihoming is the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP); yet, SCTP can only exploit at most one of the available paths at any given time. This paper introduces sender-based packet pair SCTP (SBPP-SCTP) and westwood SCTP (W-SCTP), which add concurrent multipath support to the original SCTP. The two protocols are implemented on Linux and their performance is assessed on an experimental testbed emulating different wireless-channel bandwidth and delay conditions.