PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | May 10, 2006
Proc. SPIE. 6201, Sensors, and Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) Technologies for Homeland Security and Homeland Defense V
KEYWORDS: Internet, Curium, Reliability, Resistance, Receivers, Data transmission, Telecommunications, Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, Multimedia, Network security
The communication of Future Combat Systems (FCS), with rigid timing and reliability requirements, has posed
a great challenge for the existing popular transport layer protocols such as TCP and UDP. The Stream Control
Transmission Protocol (SCTP), first designed to transmit telephony signaling messages over Internet, is a promising
transport layer candidate for FCS networks. The new SCTP features such as multi-homing, multi-streaming,
and enhanced security can significantly improve the performance of FCS applications. In this paper, we propose
modifications to the congestion control and multi-streaming parts of current SCTP specifications to allow the
support of QoS for FCS applications. Multiple streams in an SCTP association provide an aggregation mechanism
to accommodate heterogeneous objects, which belong to the same application but may require different
types of QoS from the network. However, the current SCTP specification lacks an internal mechanism to support
the preferential treatment among its streams. Our work introduces the concept of grouping SCTP streams into
subflows based on their required QoS. We propose to modify the current SCTP to implement subflows (named
SF-SCTP), each with its own flow and congestion mechanism to prevent the so-called false sharing problem.
To improve the fairness of SF-SCTP towards the original SCTP, we integrate Fractional Congestion Control
into the design. The throughput performance evaluation of SF-SCTP is studied through ns-2 experiments in a
simplified Diff-Serv network. The simulation results prove the SF-SCTP's capability to support QoS among its
streams, confirm the accuracy of the analytic models, and justify our effects to integrate FCC into SF-SCTP
since it improves the fairness between SF-SCTP and the original SCTP.
