A transport layer load sharing mechanism for mobile wireless hosts

We introduce a transport layer solution for bandwidth aggregation, based on extending stream control transmission protocol (SCTP). The extended SCTP, which we refer to as load-sharing SCTP (LS-SCTP), is able to aggregate the bandwidth of the transmission paths between the communicating endpoints. In addition, LS-SCTP can dynamically add new paths to the bundle, as they become available. To insure that the transport connection does not stall due to the high loss rate or due to continuous failure of individual paths, LS-SCTP includes path monitoring and packet assignment mechanisms. These mechanisms monitor the paths and stripe the packets according to their condition. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism in providing throughput and reliability to mobile applications.