Partial CRC Checksum of SCTP for Error Control over Wireless Networks

In the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), when a portion of a packet is corrupted, the entire packet will be discarded at the receiver side. This may result in degradation of the throughput of SCTP over wireless networks with a high bit error rate. This paper proposes a new error control scheme of SCTP using a partial Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) checksum to enhance the throughput performance, in which a new ‘checksum chunk’ is introduced to effectively identify any corruptions of data chunks contained in the SCTP packet. In the proposed scheme, an SCTP data packet can carry one or more data chunks depending on the channel condition, and the newly defined ‘checksum’ chunk will contain the partial CRC checksums of the individual data chunks and/or the base header of the packet. By referring to these partial checksums, the receiver can discard only the corrupted data chunks, whereas the other available data chunks can be recovered. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly provides better performance than the standard SCTP in the wireless networks.