SCTP with an improved cookie mechanism for wireless networks through modeling and simulation

Abstract

The stream control transport protocol (SCTP) is a new transport layer protocol that has been designed to provide reliable transport over IP networks. While the popular transport control protocol (TCP) is the most widely used protocol in the IP networks and is indeed reliable with a variety of merits, it falls short with regard to the following important aspects: (a) providing for service survivability and (b) security-more specifically, resilience to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Service survivability, i.e., providing uninterrupted service amidst random network failures is very important and SCTP helps in this regard via its "multihoming" feature. Likewise, the need for resilience to DoS attacks is obvious, and SCTP also provides for this resilience via its improved handshake mechanism and the cookie features. This paper discusses the modeling and simulation (M&S) of SCTP with particular emphasis on resilience to DoS attacks. Several key M&S aspects with regard to modeling SCTP DoS resilience are presented and discussed. As also revealed by our detailed M&S studies, the increased DoS resilience comes with increased overheads. While DoS resilience is extremely critical, reducing overheads in the resource-constrained wireless environment also assumes paramount importance. Hence we propose an innovative mechanism to significantly reduce the overheads associated with SCTP's DoS resilience.