Receiver-assisted cellular/wifi handover management for efficient multipath multimedia delivery in heterogeneous wireless networks

In a heterogeneous wireless environment, mobility particularly vertical handover between WiFi and cellular data service has to be supported. The support for multihoming feature makes Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) become a promising transport layer-based handover scheme for end users. Although the benefits of applying SCTP for multimedia delivery and handover have been proved to be extremely useful, there are still many challenges that remain: (i) current sender-centric SCTP handover management solutions fail to balance the computational overhead between a sender and receiver and (ii) they also suffer from performance degradation due to the rigid three-duplicated-SACK-based loss detection and recovery strategy. This paper proposes SCTP-Rev+, a new receiver-assisted cellular/WiFi handover management mechanism for SCTP-based multimedia transport aiming to (i) optimize SCTP handover management and achieve overhead balancing between the sender and receiver, by moving path estimation and handover decision operations from the sender onto receiver and (ii) improve SCTP loss recovery ability and multimedia delivery performance, by providing SCTP with a simple but effective retransmission-aware loss detection/recovery mechanism. We show that the proposed solution outperforms the current SCTP schemes in terms of goodput performance and multimedia delivery quality.