Towards transport-layer mobility: Evolution of SCTP multihoming

Abstract

Recently, growing availability of emerging wireless technologies has pushed the demand to integrate different wireless-network technologies such as: wireless local-area networks, cellular networks, and personal and short-range networks. The inter-working of heterogeneous radio access networks poses many technical challenges, with mobility management being one of the most important. In this paper we survey the existing proposals and show that transport-layer mobility is a viable candidate for implementing seamless handover in heterogeneous wireless access networks. Since the mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP) is at the core of most relevant transport-layer mobility schemes being currently studied, we identify the key scenarios where the protocol can effectively leverage the multihoming feature to enhance handover support. Moreover, to provide the reader with a complete overview of the mSCTP’s application area, we also survey the situations where the use of mSCTP-based schemes is not possible or has some limitations. Then, in one of the identified key scenarios, we investigate several challenging open issues related to path management and path-transition optimization by considering bandwidth-estimation schemes and link-layer support. Finally, we consider introducing concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) into mSCTP-based mobility schemes, as a future research direction.