Retransmission policies with transport layer multihoming

We evaluate several retransmission policies for transport protocols that support multihoming, such as SCTP. We find that schemes that attempt to improve the chance of success by retransmitting to an alternate peer IP address often degrade performance. Our results show that for better performance, new data transmissions and retransmissions should be sent to the same peer IP address. We also find that our Multiple Fast Retransmit algorithm further improves performance by reducing the number of timeouts. Since our results assume reachability of all peer IP addresses, we conclude with suggestions for scenarios where failures are possible. We suggest compromising some of the performance improvements to avoid performance degradation during failures.