SCTP Subflows for Survivable FCS Applications

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), a general-purpose transport layer protocol by the IETF, has been a promising candidate to join UDP and TCP as a core protocol. The new SCTP services such as multi-homing, multi-streaming, message boundary preservation, no head-of-line delivery blocking, and enhanced security features can significantly enhance performance of FCS applications. SCTP congestion control mechanism in networks with path diversity or QoS enhancements to support differentiated services, can jeopardized performance due to the socalled false sharing. We propose to modify the current SCTP such that an association is divided into several subflows based on their Differentiated Services Codepoints (DSCPs). Each sub-flow inside the SCTP association shall have its own congestion control parameters. We derived analytic models for the SCTP with the proposed modification for differentiated services environment with both DropTail and RED queues. Our simulation experiments show that our proposed solution prevents false sharing and achieves a better throughput in a differentiated services network. The simulation experiment results also verify that the analytical models accurately reflect the SCTP behavior.