The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a general-purpose transport layer protocol for IP network communications, analogous to TCP and UDP. The built-in support for multi-homed hosts allows a single SCTP association to run across multiple links to achieve link redundancy. SCTP exploits the multihoming feature through Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) by transferring new data from a source to a destination host via two or more paths, for increasing the application’s throughput. CMT receiver maintains a single rbuf which is shared across the sub-association flows. During the middle of data transmission, if any one of the paths abruptly meets with link failure, it causes the loss of data transmitted in the affected path. Due to the RTX-SAME policy, sending retransmissions to the same destination degrades the performance repeatedly, and the receiver buffer gets blocked, due to out-of-order delivery. The Potentially-Failed state (PF) mitigates receiver buffer blocking. This...
