SCTP performance improvement for reliable End-to-end communication in ad hoc networks

Abstract

When ubiquitous networks pervade in future, applications such as file transfer and web browsing will be used also on ad-hoc networks. End-to-end reliable communication is necessary for these applications, and TCP has usually been used as a transport protocol. However, it is known that the performance of fairness and transfer rate decreases when TCP is used on ad hoc networks. Particularly, multi-connection flows of TCP have danger of unfair communication among all flows sharing a wireless link. Then, we pay attention to the multistream mechanism of SCTP to improve unfair communication of TCP multi-connection. SCTP can manage multiple data streams in one association by using the multi-stream mechanism. The performance of reliable transport protocols such as TCP and SCTP easily suffers from frequent route failures and contention on the wireless channel. To improve the problem for mobile ad hoc networks, we propose a scheme which adds the mechanism of Fixed RTO and dynamic delayed SACK to SCTP (shortly, the proposal). And, we evaluated the proposal by a network simulator QualNet.