An adaptive transport protocol for balanced multihoming of real-time traffic

A consequence of the increasing availability of multiple network interfaces on the same computer system is the request for new technologies capable of fully exploiting the available resources. As a matter of fact, today's most common transport and network layer protocols are unable to use more than one interface at a time, thus wasting part of the available network resources. However, the growing demand for bandwidth and Quality of Service introduced by multimedia applications in particular could find an answer in the correct utilization of multipath connections. In this paper, we present Westwood SCTP-PR, a partially-reliable SCTP-based protocol, providing full multipath support and featuring an original adaptive load balancing technique, characteristics which make it especially suitable to real-time traffic.