SCTP-C2: Cross-layer Cognitive SCTP for multimedia streaming over multi-homed wireless networks

Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP)-based multimedia streaming has gained variety of attentions and resulted in many peer-reviewed publications. However, there is no MAC-SCTP cross-layer path switching strategy appropriate for wireless networking, where wireless error tends to occur frequently due to the intrinsic wireless link characteristics. As a remedy, we in this paper propose a novel Cross-layer Cognitive SCTP (SCTP-C2) for efficient multimedia data delivery by jointly considering the characteristics of MAC layer and transport layer. A Cross-layer Path Switching Trigger (CPST) is designed in SCTP-C2 to improve the efficiency of the path switching mechanism and further provide an optimal congestion window (cwnd) fast recovery scheme after path switching. A Congestion-aware Multimedia Data Distributor (CMDD) is introduced in SCTP-C2 to overcome a "hot-potato" congestion problem and enable an optimal transmission behavior by identifying network congestion. The results gained by a close realistic simulation topology show that how SCTP-C2 outperforms existing SCTP protocol in terms of consumers' experience of quality for multimedia streaming service.