On the Relation Between SACK Delay and SCTP Failover Performance for Different Traffic Distributions

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is an important component in the ongoing evolution towards IP in the fixed and mobile telephone networks. It is the transport protocol being used in the ongoing deployment of IETF’s signaling transport (SIGTRAN) architecture for tunneling of traditional telephony signaling traffic over IP. Further SCTP represents an alternative for future SIP signaling traffic. Key to the success of SCTP is its ability to recover from network failures, in particular failed network paths. SCTP includes multihoming and a failover mechanism which should swiftly shift from a failed or unavailable network path to a backup path. However, several studies have shown that SCTP’s failover performance is dependent on factors both related to protocol parameters and network conditions. This paper complements these studies by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of SACK delay under various traffic distributions. The results show a clear relation between the traffic distribution and the impact of the SACK delay on SCTP failover performance. Severe negative effects are observed for low intensity traffic composed of individual signaling messages. On the other hand, our results show limited impact of SACK delay for high intensity and bursty traffic. Furthermore, the results show a limited increase in network traffic by reducing the SACK delay at low traffic intensities and even less impact on network traffic at high traffic intensities. Based on these results we recommend a decrease of the SCTP SACK timer to a small value in signaling scenarios.