Improving the Performance of SCTP Transport Protocol over Wireless Networks

Stream Control Transmission Protocol(SCTP) is a reliable transport protocol combining the advantages of TCP and UDP. SCTP has many desirable features including multihoming, multistreaming, and partial data reliability. These features have made SCTP perform much more effectively in multimedia networking applications. They have also worked better in wireless environment which traditional transport protocols are ineffective and cumbersome. Before the transmission, an application using SCTP needs to establish an association between the client and the server. The establishment of association requires a number which will be used to create multiple streams. However, SCTP has not specified a method or suggested any ideas of determine the number. In our paper, we focus on the performance of SCTP protocol over the wireless networks. The ideas is to extend the SCTP with a process of determining an optimal number prior to the association establishing. We examine the modified SCTP on a simulated wireless networks, and the experiment results of simulation using NS2 have shown the modified SCTP is feasible and also demonstrated the modified SCTP’s superiority of performance over TCP and UDP over the wireless networks.