WiSE: Best-path Selection in Wireless Multihoming Environments

This paper introduces WiSE, a sender-side, transport-layer protocol that modifies the standard SCTP protocol. WiSE aims at exploiting SCTP’s multihoming capabilities by selecting in real time the best choice among available, alternate paths to the same destination. Through the use of bandwidth estimation techniques, WiSE tries to infer whether losses are due to congestion or to radio channel errors. At the same time, the available bandwidth of the current path used for transmission is matched to that of an alternate path, also probed for available bandwidth. If the current path is severely congested and the alternate path is lightly loaded, WiSE switches the transmission onto the alternate path using SCTP’s flexible path management capabilities. Extensive simulations under different scenarios highlight the superiority of the proposed solution with respect to TCP and the standard SCTP implementation.