Extension of SCTP for Concurrent Multi-Path Transfer with Parallel Subflows

With its new features such as multi-homing and multi-streaming the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has become a promising candidate as a general-purpose transport layer protocol. Multi-homing in an SCTP association can make concurrent multi-path transfer an appealing candidate to satisfy the ever increasing user demands for bandwidth. Multiple streams provide an aggregation mechanism to accommodate heterogeneous objects, which belong to the same application but may require different QoS from the network. However, the current approach lacks an internal mechanism to support preferential treatment among its streams for concurrent multi-path transfer. In this paper, we introduce WM2-SCTP (Wireless Multi-path Multi-flow - Stream Control Transmission Protocol), a transport layer solution for concurrent multi-path transfer with parallel subflows. WM²-SCTP aims at exploiting SCTP´s multi-homing and multi-streaming capability by grouping SCTP streams into subflows based on their required QoS and selecting best paths for each subflow to improve data transfer rates. The results show that under different scenarios WM2-SCTP, can effectively enhance transmission efficiency.