On the Use of SCTP in Wireless Networks

Communications networks, particularly Internet, allow starting new businesses, to improve the current ones, and to offer an easiest access to new markets. Nowadays, Internet connects millions of terminals in the world, and it is a goal that this connection could be done with anyone, at any moment, and anywhere. In order to achieve this target, new lax and varied access requirements are needed. It is expected that a user would be able to access network services in a transparent way disregarding the location. The user terminal could seamlessly use the best available access technology (e.g., WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks), LTE (Long Term Evolution), or PLC (Power Line Communications)), and service provisioning should agree with the user contract. This convergence of communications networks is giving rise to new challenges. The Internet Protocol (IP) has been selected to provide the necessary interconnection among all wireless and wired existing technologies. However, the use of IP does not solve all drawbacks. Multimedia applications show that current transport protocols like TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) or UDP (User Datagram Protocol) are not good enough to meet the new quality requirements. To face these new challenges, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) defined a new transport protocol called Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) (Stewart, 2007), whose main features are multihoming and multistreaming. Multistreaming allows transmission of several data streams within the same communication, splitting the application data into multiple streams that have the property of independently sequenced delivery, so that message losses in any one stream will only initially affect delivery within that stream, and not delivery in other streams. On the other hand, multihoming allows binding one transport layer’s association to multiple addresses at each end of the SCTP association. The binding allows a sender to transmit data packets to a multihomed receiver through one of those different destination addresses. Therefore, SCTP is not only intended for signaling, but it can be used for any data application transport. The first studies about the performance of SCTP showed promising results. For instance, in (Kamal et al., 2005), authors evaluate the benefits of using SCTP instead of TCP as the underlying transport protocol for a MPI (Message Passing Interface) middleware. Darche et al. (2006) presented a network architecture to enhance the cooperation of mobile and broadcast networks using SCTP as the transport layer protocol. In (Shaojian et al., 2005), authors study the suitability of SCTP for satellite networks. Kim et al. investigate in (Kim et al., 2006) the applicability of SCTP in MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks). In (Kozlovszky et al., 2006), authors carry out