Implementation and evaluation of concurrent multipath transfer for SCTP in the INET framework

The steadily growing importance of resilience-critical Internet applications leads to a rising number of multi-homed sites and systems. But since the protocols of the classical Internet – particularly TCP – assume a single access path only, the number of programs supporting multiple network paths is still small. The Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP), which is an advanced general-purpose transport protocol and the possible successor of TCP, brings the support of multi-homing into the applications. For technical reasons, SCTP uses one network path for data transmission and utilizes the other paths for backup only. An extension to support the load balancing of user data onto multiple paths in order to increase the payload throughput is Concurrent Multipath Transfer for SCTP, denoted as CMT-SCTP. In this paper, we describe our CMTSCTP extension for the SCTP model provided by the INET framework. By using proof-of-concept simulations, we furthermore demonstrate its usability and configuration parameters.