Evaluation of SCTP Multistreaming over Satellite Links

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol has been developed as a reliable transport protocol to carry PSTN signaling messages over an IP network. Multistreaming is one of its powerful features to overcome some of the bottlenecks of single streamed protocols such as TCP. In this paper, we study the impact of multistreaming in increasing the performance of SCTP over error prone satellite networks. We first show that multistreaming results in higher goodput than single streams when the receiver buffer is constrained as in the case of wireless handheld devices. We then demonstrate that the multistreaming feature of SCTP results in reduced buffer requirements at the receiver in the presence of losses in the satellite network. The above advantages makes SCTP an attractive transport protocol for wireless handheld devices.

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