AuthorsJ. Pedersen, C. Griwodz and P. Halvorsen
EditorsK. Christensen and M. Frank
TitleConsiderations for SCTP Retransmission Delays for Thin Streams
AfilliationCommunication Systems, Communication Systems
StatusPublished
Publication TypeProceedings, refereed
Year of Publication2006
Conference NameLocal Computer Networks (LCN 2006)
Pagination135 - 142
Date PublishedNov
PublisherIEEE
ISBN Number1-4244-0419-3
Abstract

The popularity of distributed interactive applications has exploded in the last few years. For example, massive multi-player online games have become a fast growing, multi-million industry with a very high user mass supporting hundreds or thousands of concurrent players. Today, such games are usually client-server applications that use TCP for time-dependent communication. Similar multimedia applications also choose TCP frequently. Very thin data streams are sent over each of these TCP connections, which means that they consume very little bandwidth. TCP has several shortcomings with respect to the latency requirements of such thin streams because of its retransmission handling. An alternative to TCP may be SCTP which was developed to answer the requirements for signaling transport. SCTP has subsequently also been considered more appropriate than TCP for congestion controlled streaming of other time-dependent data. Important reasons are its maintenance of packet boundaries and partial reliability. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the Linux SCTP implementation for thin streams. Like others before, we identify latency challenges. We also propose some enhancements for reducing the latency compared to the original Linux implementation. We argue for separate handling of thin and thick data streams in SCTP.

Notes

(best paper award)

Citation KeyPedersen.2006.1