Retransmission policies for multihomed transport protocols

We evaluate three retransmission policies for transport protocols that support multihoming (e.g. SCTP). The policies dictate whether retransmissions are sent to the same peer IP address as the original transmission, or sent to an alternate peer IP address. Each policy presents tradeoffs based on the paths' bandwidth, delay, loss rate, and IP destination reachability. We find that sending all retransmissions to an alternate peer IP address is useful when the primary IP address becomes unreachable, but often degrades performance in non-failure scenarios. On the other hand, sending all retransmissions to the same peer IP address as the original transmission reverses the tradeoffs. We balance the tradeoffs by proposing a hybrid policy that sends fast retransmissions to the same peer IP address as the original transmission, and sends timeout retransmissions to an alternate peer IP address. We show that even with extensions which we proposed to improve the policies' performance, the hybrid policy is the best performing policy in failure and non-failure scenarios.

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