Improving the performance of SCTP Transport Protocol over wireless networks

Stream Control Transmission Protocol(SCTP) is a re-liable transport protocol combining the advantages of TCP and UDP. SCTP has many desirable features in-cluding multihoming, multistreaming, and partial data reliability. These features have made SCTP perform much more effectively in multimedia networking appli-cations. They have also worked better in wireless envi-ronment which traditional transport protocols are inef-fective and cumbersome. Before the transmission, an application using SCTP needs to establish an association between the client and the server. The establishment of association requires a number which will be used to create multiple streams. However, SCTP has not specified a method or suggested any ideas of determine the number. In our paper, we focus on the performance of SCTP protocol over the wireless networks. The ideas is to ex-tend the SCTP with a process of determining an optimal number prior to the association establishing. We ex-amine the modified SCTP on a simulated wireless net-works, and the experiment results of simulation using NS2 have shown the modified SCTP is feasible and also demonstrated the modified SCTP’s superiority of per-formance over TCP and UDP over the wireless net-works.