Known as multihoming, devices with more than one network interface can enhance their performance capabilities by harnessing unused resources from alternative access networks. Whether it is improved reliability or sheer throughput potential, network devices will benefit from a multihomed framework. Unfortunately, our current means of guaranteeing reliability while maintaining quality control, specifically, the transmission control protocol (TCP), does not support multihoming. Despite the latter, a relatively young transport layer standard called the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP), incorporates multihoming into its design. In this talk, we present the state of-the-art multihoming techniques using SCTP. A comprehensive overview of three main research areas will be presented, namely: handover management, concurrent multipath transfer (CMT), and congestion window management.

Biography

Abdallah Shami received the B.E. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Lebanese University, Beirut, Lebanon in 1997, and the Ph.D. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, New York, NY in September 2002. In September 2002, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada as an Assistant Professor. Since July 2004, he has been with Western University, Canada where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His current research interests are in the area of wireless/optical networking. Dr. Shami is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Communications Letters and IEEE Communications Tutorials and SUrvey. Dr. Shami has chaired key symposia for IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE ICNC, and ICCIT. Dr. Shami is a Senior Member of IEEE.