SmSCTP: A Fast Transport Layer Handover Method Using Single Wireless Interface

Many handover techniques in the Internet have been introduced with the development of mobile computing technologies. Although many proposed handover schemes utilize multiple interfaces, having multiple interfaces can increase power consumption, device installation space and hardware costs of mobile devices. Therefore, we have been studying handover schemes for mobile nodes with a single wireless network interface. To achieve seamless and efficient handover, we focus on stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) which offers message-oriented, reliable and connection-oriented delivery transport service. Unlike other transport protocols such as TCP, SCTP can provide an end-to-end handover mechanism with a multi-homing feature. However, the handover mechanism in the current SCTP causes large handover delay especially when a mobile node has only one single wireless network interface. In this paper, we have investigated the current issues in the SCTP handover mechanism and propose a new handover scheme based on SCTP, which identifies a communication path as a pair of source and destination address. We also propose new data retransmission feature for smooth handover.