Receiver-driven SCTP-based multimedia streaming services in heterogeneous wireless networks

The packet loss and handover tend to occur often in burst in heterogeneous wireless network. The Sender-based transport control mechanisms make current SCTP cannot provide an expected adaptive transmission rate adjustment and recovery strategy to ensure the users´ quality of experience for multimedia streaming service due to the abrupt and frequent transmission rate fluctuation. Moreover, current SCTP solutions seldom consider balancing the overhead and sharing the load between the sender and receiver. In this paper, we propose a novel receiver-driven SCTP-based multimedia delivery solution which runs some important functions at receiver including: 1) appropriate sending rate estimation and advertisement, supported by a designed receiver-based sending rate estimator; and 2) primary path selection and fast recovery, enabled by a developed receiver-assisted path switch trigger. The simulation results show that how the proposed solution outperforms existing SCTP protocol in terms of multimedia delivery performance.