Seamless handover among heterogeneous mobile networks using stream control transmission protocol (SCTP)
The Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP) is being adopted for general transport by IETF. SCTP supports multi-homing and allows endpoints to use multiple heterogeneous links in an association. An enhancement known as dynamic address reconfiguration (ASCONF) defines procedures to gracefully add and remove network addresses from an association without restarting the connection. These advantages over traditional TCP make SCTP a promising candidate for transport layer mobility. This work establishes key weaknesses of SCTP impeding its deployment, such as NAT traversal issues and poor fault resilience in asymmetric multi-homed topologies. To address these limitations, modifications to the protocol were designed, implemented and extensively tested. An application was developed and tested on existing commercial networks to demonstrate seamless session handover between IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) networks. This proves that with the proposed modifications, SCTP may be easily supported by existing wireless networks.
SCTP, Heterogeneous networks, Handover, Multi-homing
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