Performance of Network Redundancy in SCTP : Introducing effect of different factors on Multi-homing

The main purpose of designing the Stream Control Protocol (SCTP) was tooffer a robust transfer of traffic between the hosts over the networks. For this reasonSCTP multi-homing feature was designed, in which an SCTP sender can access destinationhost with multiple IP addresses in the same session. If the primary path between the sourceand the destination is down, the traffic may still be sent to the destination by utilizingredundant path. And SCTP multi-homing also supports for the concurrent multipathtransfer of traffic. This paper introduces the effect of different network factors likeconcurrent cross traffic, congestion control algorithms and SACK timers on multi -homingfeature of SCTP. Throughput and end-to-end packet delay were used as performancemetrics to introduce the effect of these factors. From the study it was introduced thatconcurrent cross traffic in the network behaves same on multi -homed interfaces and bothinterfaces were affected almost same. It was concluded that congestion control algorithmsalso affects on multi-homing, the RED congestion control algorithm reduced delay andimproved throughput of the SCTP multi-homing. In RFC4960 recommended SACK timeris 200ms, but when 100ms SACK timer was used with concurrent multipath transfer inSCTP (CMT-SCTP) multi-homing, the high throughput and low delay was achieved ascompared with 200ms and 300ms, which indicated that different SACK timers affects onmulti-homing feature of SCTP. All the simulation works have been conducted in NS2network simulator.