Enhancement of SCTP Throughput using Chunk Checksum

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) uses the 32-bit checksum in the common header, by which a corrupted SCTP packet will be regarded as a lost packet and then discarded. This may result in degradation of SCTP's throughput performance over wireless networks. This paper proposes a new chunk checksum scheme for SCTP, in which each data chunk contains its own checksum field and SACK chunk carry corresponding Transmission Sequence Number (TSN) with timestamp for every corruption event. The proposed chunk checksum scheme is introduced with the following three purposes: 1) to distinguish the chunk corruptions from the chunk losses; 2) to avoid the unnecessary halving of the congestion window (cwnd) in the case of chunk corruption; 3) to avoid the unwanted timeouts which can be induced in conventional SCTP in the case that the retransmitted data chunks are corrupted again in wireless networks. Simulation results show that the proposed chunk checksum scheme could improve the SCTP throughput in the wireless environments with a high bit error rate.