A Novel Method for SCTP Load Sharing

SCTP is a general purpose transport protocol featuring multi-homing support and flexible, message oriented data delivery services. With respect to multi-homing, the SCTP standard uses this feature for network level redundancy only and, thus, does not provide load sharing capabilities among the redundant links. In order to satisfy the strict performance requirements for signaling transport, efficient load sharing among all active links is desirable in certain scenarios. Therefore, some extensions providing load sharing functionality have been proposed. In this paper, we suggest an improved load sharing algorithm for SCTP with path based selective acknowledgements and present results of a simulation study to demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm.