Improving End-to-End Throughput of Mobile IP using SCTP

Mobile IP is the IETF-proposed standard to offer seamless mobile computing. A new transport layer protocol, called Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), has recently been accepted by IETF as a proposed standard to address a number of TCP limitations. Most of the previous research on end-to-end throughput over Mobile IP has been carried out on TCP-Reno. Both TCP and SCTP can use Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) for error recovery. In this paper, the effect of SCTP on the improvement of throughput during handovers in Mobile IP is analyzed. We show that SCTP has a better performance than TCPReno and TCP-SACK due to its support for unlimited number of SACK blocks. We conclude that SCTP can be used to improve the end-to-end throughput when the bottleneck link bandwidth is low.