Westwood SCTP: load balancing over multipaths using bandwidth-aware source scheduling

Abstract

While it is more and more usual to buy computer equipment with multiple network interfaces, and the proliferation of ISPs for both wired and wireless users provides different solutions to access the network core, upper layers across the protocol spectrum seem unprepared to accept the challenge posed by multiple interfaces and, consequently, by multiple paths between the same source-destination pair. This paper tries to partially answer this challenge by proposing an enhancement of the SCTP protocol that aims at balancing load across multiple connections on disjoint paths in an accurate fashion, through the knowledge of bandwidth estimation on each path. Some results confirm the viability of the approach and invite further research.