Performance Evaluation on SCTP multi-homing Feature

Stream Control Transmission Protocol(SCTP) is a new connection-oriented, reliable delivery transport protocol operating on top of an unreliable connectionless packet service such as IP. It inherits many of the functions developed for TCP, including flow control and packet loss recovery functions. In addition, it also supports transport layer multihoming and multistreaming In this paper, we study the impact of multi-homing on the performance of SCTP. We first compare performance of single-homed SCTP. multi-homed SCTP, TCP Reno and TCP SACK. We, then describe potential flaw in the current SCTP retransmission policy, when SCTP host is multihomed. Our Results show that SCTP performs better than TCP Reno and TCP SACK due to several changes from TCP in its congestion control mechanism. In particular. multi-homed SCTP shows the best result among the compared schemes. Through experimentation for multi-homed SCTP, we found that the current SCTP retransmission policy nay deteriorate the perfomance when the retransmission path it worse than the original path. Therefore, the condition of retransmission path is a very important factor In SCTP performance and a proper mechanism would be required to measure the condition of the retransmission path