Reducing Specious Recovery of End-to-End Failover for Stream Control Transport Protocol

Using the application of bulk data transfer, we investigate current failover mechanism and permanent failover mechanism for SCTP. We surprisingly find that both failover mechanisms have a hidden danger of spurious recovery that occur on the primary path, which cause traffic sending to the alternate path migrate back to the primary path rashly, this aggressive migration throttles the sending rate. In order to avoid this sending rate slowdown, we first present a major potential change to SCTP - the concept of "failover's robust recovery" using a primary recovery threshold (PRT) and a new failover mechanism called SCTP's robust failover mechanism (SRFM) based on a two-level threshold (i.e., PMR and PRT) to reduce spurious recovery and to further improve performance of failover mechanism.