Stream Control Transport Protocol Research Articles

Preventing quality degradation of video streaming using selective redundancy

Video streaming has already become the main portion of data traffic over the Internet. However, it is hard to guarantee the user-perceived video quality in single access networks due to the limitation in available bandwidth. Multihomed systems enable concurrent multipath data transfer over multiple network paths. Path control can be implemented at the transport layer such as in Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP). SCTP has built-in support for multihoming, but offers only a limited standard path selection mechanism. In this paper a new method for video streaming over SCTP is proposed. Secondary paths are used to send redundant information to prevent degradation of viewer’s perceived quality. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by computer simulations using video coded with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding). The results show that the proposed method can prevent degradation of video quality at the cost of small extra bandwidth usage.

CMT‐CQA: Cross‐layer QoS‐aware adaptive concurrent multipath data transfer in heterogeneous networks

Stream control transport protocol (SCTP)‐based concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) can help multi‐homed devices to increase their throughput by making use of parallel transmissions over multiple paths and bandwidth aggregation. However, if CMT cannot identify wireless error, it cannot really achieve the desired performance. Furthermore, if CMT only utilizes all available paths for data delivery, it will undoubtedly degrade application‐level performance since the asymmetric paths may involve large quality differences. This paper proposes a novel cross‐layer quality‐of‐service (QoS)‐aware adaptive CMT (CMT‐CQA) with the following aims: (i) to provide an adaptive ‘CMT‐to‐partial CMT’ adjustment strategy for efficient bandwidth aggregation by jointly considering transport layer QoS, MAC layer QoS, and path history information; (ii) to address an enhanced congestion window (cwnd) fast recovery mechanism to reduce bursty transmission in multi‐homed wireless network environments where fail‐over occurs frequently; and (iii) to introduce a proper multimedia transmission behavior to improve users' quality of experience (QoE) for multimedia streaming service. Simulation results show that CMT‐CQA outperforms the existing CMT solutions in terms of performance and QoS. © 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Qos-driven SCTP-based multimedia delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks

Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP)-based handover is supposedly the best suit for current mobile Internet users. However, prevalent SCTP-based handover solutions mostly evaluate candidate networks by a function of multiple attributes such as available bandwidth, delay, etc., which tend to vary often in burst and might cause the instability of handover decisions. Moreover, the SCTP congestion control strategy leads to sudden degradation of users’ quality of experience for multimedia streaming service because of abrupt and frequent strong fluctuations in the transmission rate. In this paper, we propose a novel QoS-driven SCTPbased handover solution (SCTP-QD) appropriate for heterogeneous wireless multimedia transmission. A new network service and transport layer QoS-aware model is designed to help SCTP-QD accurately analyze the service stability and data transmission capacity for each path. A proper QoS-driven handover decision model is introduced in SCTP-QD in order to improve the SCTP handover efficiency while reducing unnecessary handoffs and fail-over probability. A proposal is finally addressed to help SCTP-QD avoid the slow start phase whenever handover occurs. The simulation results show that SCTP-QD outperforms existing solutions in terms of data delivery performance.

An Experimental Study of SCTP in NS2

SCTP (Stream Control Transport Protocol) is a reliable transport layer protocol which provides acknowledged, error-free and non-duplicated transfer of message. It combines the advantages of TCP and UDP. In additional to that, SCTP has many attractive characteristics such as multi-homing, multi-streaming and partial data reliability. This paper thoroughly discusses about the advantages of SCTP. We have experimented the SCTP endpoints data transmission by using NS2 (Network Simulator 2) tool including multi-homed SCTP nodes data transmission. The result shows that an SCTP node in NS2 cannot be truly multi-homed. Hence, NS2 still lacks of full implementation of SCTP features.

CMT-QA: Quality-Aware Adaptive Concurrent Multipath Data Transfer in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Mobile devices equipped with multiple network interfaces can increase their throughput by making use of parallel transmissions over multiple paths and bandwidth aggregation, enabled by the stream control transport protocol (SCTP). However, the different bandwidth and delay of the multiple paths will determine data to be received out of order and in the absence of related mechanisms to correct this, serious application-level performance degradations will occur. This paper proposes a novel quality-aware adaptive concurrent multipath transfer solution (CMT-QA) that utilizes SCTP for FTP-like data transmission and real-time video delivery in wireless heterogeneous networks. CMT-QA monitors and analyses regularly each path's data handling capability and makes data delivery adaptation decisions to select the qualified paths for concurrent data transfer. CMT-QA includes a series of mechanisms to distribute data chunks over multiple paths intelligently and control the data traffic rate of each path independently. CMT-QA's goal is to mitigate the out-of-order data reception by reducing the reordering delay and unnecessary fast retransmissions. CMT-QA can effectively differentiate between different types of packet loss to avoid unreasonable congestion window adjustments for retransmissions. Simulations show how CMT-QA outperforms existing solutions in terms of performance and quality of service.

Resolving Unordered Issues for CMT-SCTP in Heterogeneous Wireless Network

Concurrent Multi-path Transfer extension of the Stream Control Transport Protocol (CMT-SCTP) has great potential to improve the utilization of scarce network bandwidth resource. Traditional CMT-SCTP adopts Round Robin (RR) algorithms to carry out packet scheduling that could affect the performance of SCTP traffic as unordered issues. In this paper, we discuss the unordered issues and propose a novel packet scheduling algorithm to improve the performance in heterogeneous wireless network. Our main idea is predicting the packet arriving time and then provides a path selection strategy. Through measuring round-trip time (RTT) and available bandwidth, we achieve an algorithm to predict the arriving time of data packets on one path, then give a reasonable path selection strategy to make sure that data arrives in the right order. By using proposed algorithm, the unordered packets and receive buffer blocking are reduced. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm by comparing it with the RR algorithm and show that it can resolve several performance issues.

Environment-Aware CMT for Efficient Video Delivery in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) have gained significant attention with capabilities of retrieving video and audio streams, still images, and scalar sensor data but with challenge of high data loss. As more and more wireless devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces, multimedia delivery over multipath has been cognized as a more promising approach in wireless transmission. In this paper, based on the Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) extension for Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP), we propose a novel environment-aware CMT (e-CMT) to overcome the high data loss challenge, as well as “a hot potato” congestion problem in wireless transmission. The e-CMT provides environment-aware cognitive ability for efficient video delivery with three modules, which are Path Quality-aware Model (PQM) that devotes to estimate path quality and select candidate path using for retransmission, Adaptive Retransmission Trigger (ART) that contributes to cognize packet loss and trigger efficient retransmission behaviors, and Congestion-avoid Data Distributor (CDD) that serves to enable Partial-Reliable retransmission to mitigate congestion condition. We design a close realistic topology to present how the e-CMT outperforms the original CMT for efficient video delivery over multihomed WMSNs.

Wireless Transport Layer Congestion Control Evaluation

The performance of transport layer protocols can be affected differently due to wireless congestion, as opposed to network congestion. Using an active network evaluation strategy in a real world test-bed experiment, the Transport Control Protocol (TCP), Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP), and Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP) were evaluated to determine their effectiveness in terms of throughput, fairness, and smoothness. Though TCP’s fairness was shown to suffer in wireless congestion, the results showed that it still outperforms the alternative protocols in both wireless congestion, and network congestion. In terms of smoothness, the TCP-like congestion control algorithm of DCCP did outperform TCP in wireless congestion, but at the expense of throughput and ensuing fairness. SCTP’s congestion control algorithm was also found to provide better smoothness in wireless congestion. In fact, it provided smoother throughput performance than in the network congestion.

Concurrent multipath transfer protocol used in ad hoc networks

This study studies the received buffer blocking problem caused by traditional concurrent multipath transfer protocol. The authors propose a new transport protocol, named wireless concurrent multipath transfer stream control transport protocol (WCMT-SCTP), to solve the received buffer blocking problem. It can bind certain data streams to certain paths and use multiple active paths to transfer data simultaneously. The authors evaluate the performance of WCMT-SCTP through theoretical analysis and extensive simulation. Both simulation and analysis results show WCMT-SCTP can improve the system throughput obviously and keep the independence of data streams.