EAU: Efficient Address Updating for Seamless Handover in Multi-homed Mobile Environments

Dynamic address configuration is essential when maintaining seamless communication sessions in heterogeneous mobile environments. This paper identifies some significant problems when using the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) Dynamic Address Reconfiguration (SCTPDAR) extension. We illustrate that SCTP-DAR can enter a deadlock state during the handover phase, ultimately resulting in communication failure. Deadlock arises as a result of the basic design rationale of SCTP-DAR, i.e. using a data oriented transmission scheme to transmit address update messages. This paper proposes a new transmission control mechanism for efficiently exchanging up-to-date address information between association endpoints. In particular we introduce an address operation consolidation algorithm which eliminates address operation redundancy. In addition, a priority based transmission re-scheduling algorithm for address updating operations is proposed to detect and remove potential deadlock situations. The above schemes have been verified through experiments.