Performance of SCTP over high speed wide area networks

The stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is a reliable transport protocol to tackle the limitations of TCP and UDP, SCTP was originally designed to transport PSTN signaling messages over IP networks, but is also capable of serving as a general-purpose transport protocol. SCTP provides attractive features such as multi-streaming and multi-homing that may be helpful in high-mobility environment and additional security against denial-of-service attacks based on SYN flooding. SCTP congestion control mechanisms are based upon TCP congestion principals with the exception of the fast recovery algorithm. Original SCTP congestion control can perform badly in high-speed wide area networks because of its slow response with large congestion window. The challenge for any alternative protocol is to better utilize networks with high bandwidth delay products in a simple and robust manner without badly interacting with existing traffic. We propose a new congestion control scheme based on the simple congestion window modification for SCTP to improve its performance in high-speed wide area networks. The results of several experiments proved that our new suggested congestion control scheme for SCTP in high speed network improved the throughput of the original SCTP congestion control scheme significantly