A Two-level Threshold Recovery Mechanism for SCTP

One important feature of the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is its network failure detection and recovery mechanism provided by direct support of multihoming. This mechanism is conservative (and rightfully so), but unfortunately does not fully exploit SCTP’s multihoming capability to maintain seamless communication between the endpoints. We decouple the failure detection from the recovery process, and propose a recovery mechanism that increases throughput. Our proposed solution does not wait until failure is detected before initiating a recovery process. Instead, the recovery process begins during early signs of a possible failure, while the same conservative failure detection is maintained. We argue that our proposed recovery scheme improves overall throughput.