Performance improvement of SCTP communication using selective bicasting on lossy multihoming environment

In recent years, with proliferation of smart phones and tablet PCs, speedup of wireless LAN communication is required for dealing with increase of traffic in wireless networks. However, transmission speed through a wireless network often slows down in comparison with that through a wired network since packets of wireless networks frequently drop due to the influence of surrounding environment such as electromagnetic noise. In this paper, we propose a method to mitigate the impacts caused by packet loss by virtue of SCTP bicasting in lossy multihoming environment with two or more wireless networks. This method bicasts not all packets but only important packets concerning retransmission for efficiency since bicasting all packets would cause congestion. We also implemented a prototype system based on the proposed method. According to the result of performance evaluation experiment, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method by the fact that the prototype system performed faster transmission than normal SCTP transmission even in high packet loss rate environment.