A path switching scheme for SCTP based on round trip delays

Abstract

Due to the rapid development of network applications, today the Internet plays an important role in our everyday life. Users hope that the network is always speedy enough to help them access the Internet without any delay. But the real situation is far from the ideal case. In the future, network researchers will continuously improve the network speed, and try to develop networks that are robust, without any crashes or packet loss. In this paper, we propose an aggressive path switching scheme for SCTP. Before data transmission, the scheme selects the fastest path as the primary path to transmit packets. When the path fails or transmission quality is poor, this scheme evaluates alternate paths, and selects the one with the best quality as the new primary path to substitute for the original one. After that, packets are delivered through the new path. Several factors are considered in the evaluation, including bandwidth, encryption/decryption, size of the congestion window, retransmission policy, routing policy, etc.