Building Multihoming Awareness into FAST TCP: A Simulation Analysis
M. Junaid Arshad, Muhammad Saleem Mian · 2009
The remarkable growth of high-capacity network environments and communication systems (from point-to-point connections or multipoint-to-point or multihomed structures) reveals that these growing technologies (such as Grid computing environments) are now requesting improved and advanced network transport-layer level features. An end-to-end transport layer multihoming using concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) of data is an efficient approach that will be able to meet the demand for required bandwidth and connectivity, but the current multihomed-aware protocols (like SCTP or pTCP) are not designed for high-capacities and large-latencies networks, they often show throughput degradation while sending and sharing huge data files over long-distance WANs. It has been shown that SCTP-CMT is more sensitive to receiver buffer (rbuf) constraints, and this rbuf blocking problem causes considerable performance problems if multiple paths are utilized simultaneously. In this research paper, we demonstrate the weakness of SCTP-CMT rbuf constraints and, we then identify that rbuf blocking problem in SCTP multihoming is mostly due to its loss-based nature for detecting network congestion. We present a simulation-based performance comparison of FAST TCP versus SCTP in high-speed networks. The objective of this article is threefold: to discuss rbuf blocking problems in SCTP-CMT; to describe some proposed transport protocols (like FAST TCP) that solve a number of throughput issues; and finally, to gain new insight into these protocols and thereby suggest avenues for future research. [Journal of American Science 2009;5(2):119-128] (ISSN: 1545-1003)