On some open issues in load sharing in SCTP

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is an emerging transport protocol for IP. networks, which can be successfully adopted to transport both signaling messages and multimedia data. Moreover, SCTP provides reliability to communications, by means of multihomed hosts (i.e. host equipped with multiple IP addresses) and failover mechanism. A proper use of these two features enables an increase of the effective throughput during communications, realizing an end-to-end load sharing, which enables endpoint applications to split source data to transmit over all available paths. In this paper, we summarize some problems arising in order to achieve this goal. These problems are tied both to protocol implementation and to the availability of general techniques to infer path characteristics, such as the location of the points of congestion, which affect system fairness and load sharing efficiency.