Improving Performance of SCTP in Presence of Traffic Load and Link-Level Errors

SCTP is an emerging transport protocol that has TCP-like congestion control mechanism. This mechanism allows congestion to build up till packet loss occurs. The loss of packets leads to retransmissions causing excessive delay jitters and increasing traffic burden on the network. Moreover, the build-up of the congestion in the network causes the packets to suffer high queuing delays. We have employed a RTT based congestion control technique [5], [21] in SCTP which avoids occurrence of extreme congestion situations and does not depend upon packet-loss for detection of congestion. With this scheme the queue-occupancy of the packets and unnecessary packet losses can be controlled. As a result the packet latency and jitter decreases and the utilization efficiency of the links improve. Further, the scheme greatly improves performance in presence of link-level errors. Particularly, it gives significantly improved throughput and fairness and reduced latency and packet loss. Experimental results have been obtained to that effect.