Concurrent-Multipath-Communication SCTP A Novel Method For Multi-Path Data Transmission

Multi-homing at the transport layer is a mechanism that ties one transport layer association to several network interfaces at each communication host, which enabling the two end-nodes to exchange data over several network paths. Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) supports multi-homing feature. We suggest Concurrent Multipath CommunicationSCTP (CMC-SCTP) which uses multi-homing as a base for simultaneous data transmission over multiple paths to increase end-to-end path throughput and network path failover. In this paper we identify the negative side effects of re-sequencing due to the use of CMC that must be managed in order to get the full performance of CMC’s parallel data transmission. To overcome this weakness we proposed new chunks and algorithms to eliminate these side effects. Sender maps a general transmission sequence number for each data packet to a dedicated sequence number for each path to controls the transmission status independently for each path. A control packet called statuschunk informs the receiver about the path number of each transmitted data chunk and the status of transmitted data on each path. An OPNET simulation evaluates the performance of our CMC-SCTP protocol extension. Keywords-component; SCTP; Multi-homing; Load-Sharing; QoS; multipath communication; congestion control; transport layer