Performance evaluation of subflow capable SCTP

With its new features such as multi-homing, multi-streaming, and enhanced security, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has become a promising candidate to join UDP and TCP as a general-purpose transport layer protocol. Multiple streams in an SCTP association provide an aggregation mechanism to accommodate heterogeneous objects, which belong to the same application but may require different types of QoS from the network. However, the current SCTP specification lacks an internal mechanism to support the preferential treatment among its streams. Our earlier work introduced the concept of grouping SCTP streams into subflows based on their required QoS. We proposed to modify the current SCTP to implement subflows, each with its own flow and congestion mechanism to prevent the so-called false sharing. In this paper, performance evaluation of subflow capable SCTP (SF-SCTP) is studied through a set of extensive simulation experiments. The results show that the proposed SF-SCTP design is able to support QoS among the SCTP streams and that false sharing is avoided. The results also reveal SF-SCTP’s significant benefits in improving the utilization of a bottleneck network.