Performance Enhancement of Transport Layer Handover on Single-Homed Mobile Nodes

Abstract

Many handover techniques in the Internet have been introduced with the development of mobile computing technologies. Although many proposed handover schemes utilize multiple wireless interfaces, having multiple wireless interfaces in a mobile device increases its power consumption, device installation space, and hardware costs. We have been studying handover schemes for mobile nodes with a single wireless interface. To achieve seamless and efficient handover, we focus on Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) that offers a message-oriented, reliable and connection-oriented delivery transport service. Unlike other transport protocols like TCP, SCTP can provide an end-to-end handover mechanism with multi-homing feature. However, the handover mechanism in the current SCTP causes large handover latency particularly when a mobile node has only one single wireless interface. This paper investigates the current issues of the SCTP handover mechanism, and proposes a new efficient handover scheme based on SCTP, which identifies a communication path as a pair of source and destination address. Additionally, we modified SCTP behavior when an SCTP endpoint received a SET PRIMARY message to change primary destination of peer endpoint. This paper shows that our scheme can reduce the handover latency by two to thirty seconds.