Loss Detection Mechanism in SCTP Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

In recent years, increasing number of services and applications are widely offered to users over the wireless networks by making use of their ubiquitous access support. However, the current SCTP does not work well in heterogeneous wireless networks, where bit error rate (BER) is high and congestion is not the only cause of packet loss. SCTP may incorrectly interprets these losses as sign of network congestion and throttles its transmission rate, which significantly degrades end-to-end performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel loss detection mechanism for SCTP to differentiate different types of packet loss, in order to improve the transmission performance of SCTP in heterogeneous wireless network. The simulations show how this mechanism achieves better performance and transmission efficiency in comparison with the basic SCTP solution.