Measurement and Improvement of the Delay of SCTP Multihoming Path Switch

SCTP multihoming feature has been widely exploited to develop schemes for mobile host handoff, e.g., mSCTP. However, there is no research work on the measurement of path switch delay in practical SCTP implementations. In this paper, we consider the possible case of SCTP path switch delay on common Linux system testbed with SCTP implementation.Our experiment demonstrates that many packets are blocked in the duration of path switch, where the delay usually results from the timeout/retransmission trial process. And we propose an approach to intelligently bypass retransmission phase without modifying the SCTP protocol. The experiment results show that the path switch delay can be significantly reduced and has no negative impact on the whole performance.