On Switchover Performance in Multihomed SCTP

The emergence of real-time applications, like Voice over IP and video conferencing, in IP networks implies a challenge to the underlying infrastructure. Several real-time applications have requirements on timeliness as well as on reliability and are accompanied by signaling applications to set up, tear down and control the media sessions. Since neither of the traditional transport protocols responsible for end-to-end transfer of messages was found suitable for signaling traffic, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) was standardized. The focus for the protocol was initially on telephony signaling applications, but it was later widened to serve as a general purpose transport protocol. One major new feature to enhance robustness in SCTP is multihoming, which enables for more than one path within the same association. In this thesis we evaluate some of the mechanisms affecting transmission performance in case of a switchover between paths in a multihomed SCTP session. The major part of the evaluation concerns a failure situation, where the current path is broken. In case of failure, the endpoint does not get an explicit notification, but has to react upon missing acknowledgements. The challenge is to distinguish path failure from temporary congestion to decide when to switch to an alternate path. A too fast switchover may be spurious, which could reduce transmission performance, while a too late switchover also results in reduced transmission performance. This implies a tradeoff which involves several protocol as well as network parameters and we elaborate among these to give a coherent view of the parameters and their interaction. Further, we present a recommendation on how to tune the parameters to meet telephony signaling requirements, still without violating fairness to other traffic. We also consider another angle of switchover performance, the startup on the alternate path. Since the available capacity is usually unknown to the sender, the transmission on a new path is started at a low rate and then increased as acknowledgements of successful transmissions return. In case of switchover in the middle of a media session the startup phase after a switchover could cause problems to the application. In multihomed SCTP the availability of the alternate path makes it feasible for the end-host to estimate the available capacity on the alternate path prior to the switchover. Thus, it would be possible to implement a more efficient startup scheme. In this thesis we combine different switchover scenarios with relevant traffic. For these combinations, we analytically evaluate and quantify the potential performance gain from utilizing an ideal startup mechanism as compared to the traditional startup procedure.