Collaborative SCTP: a collaborative approach to improve the performance of SCTP over wired-cum-wireless networks

Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is one of the latest transport layer protocols. It is equipped with many new features, such as multi-stream and multi-homing, and still maintains TCP-like congestion control mechanisms. Like TCP, SCTP fails to differentiate wireless loss from congestion loss, thus its performance over wired-cum-wireless networks suffers from unnecessary congestion window decreases. To improve the performance of SCTP in such a scenario, a new approach with the collaboration of multiple entities and interaction of multiple network layers is proposed. Simulation experiments, conducted through extended ns-2, validated that the proposed approach is adaptive to the variable bit error rate (BER) of the wireless channel, and can achieve higher goodput along with higher bandwidth utilization efficiency.