Performance improvement for CMT-SCTP via load-balancing virtual connections

Abstract

As the rapid advance of communication and network technologies, many new applications have been created and the bandwidth needed for these Internet applications are more increasing than ever. Due to the limitations of traditional communication protocols with single-path transmission, its bandwidth is not enough for bandwidth-hungry applications such as real-time multimedia streaming. However, most of today's computers or mobile devices have at least two or more wired or wireless network interfaces. Some scholars have proposed different idea of concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) to aggregate available bandwidth from heterogeneous networks over Internet. In this paper, we focus on the performance problem from concurrent multipath transfer. The problem is about how to effectively transport data over asymmetric paths with very different bandwidth provision. The best-known reason of inefficient bandwidth-aggregation of CMT is buffer blocking problem for paths' uneven bandwidth. Thus, we propose an enhanced CMT scheme via load-balancing virtual connections (VC). We actually construct and configure the VC-CMT test-bed based on the original CMT-SCTP stack on FreeBSD operating system. The performance results demonstrate the high feasibility of our proposed VC-CMT, which can provide cost-effective bandwidth aggregation for multi-link transmission.