Concurrent multipath communication for real-time traffic

The growing availability of multiple network interfaces on both mobile and fixed hosts makes concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) an appealing option to improve the performance of increasingly bandwidth-hungry multimedia applications. The Westwood Stream Control Transmission Protocol with Partial Reliability (W-PR-SCTP) is a partially reliable, SCTP-based transport protocol featuring a novel adaptive traffic-scheduling algorithm enabling CMT of multimedia real-time traffic on multihomed hosts. This paper introduces W-PR-SCTP, reports a thorough evaluation of the new protocol with the ns-2 network simulator under several traffic scenarios, outlines its implementation in Linux and its testing in a simple experimental setup.