Stream Control Transmission Protocol

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a transport layer protocol defined in 2000 by the IETF. The protocol is defined in RFC 2960, and an introductory text is provided by RFC 3286.

As a transport protocol, SCTP is equivalent in a sense to TCP or UDP. Indeed it provides some similar services as TCP, ensuring reliable, in-sequence transport of messages with congestion control. While TCP is byte-oriented, SCTP deals with framed messages.

A major contribution of SCTP is multi-homing support, where one (or both) endpoints of a connection can consist of more than one IP address, enabling transparent fail-over between hosts or network cards.

SCTP was originally intended for the transport of telephony (SS7) protocols over IP, with the goal of duplicating some of the reliability attributes of the SS7 signaling network in IP. This IETF effort is known as SIGTRAN . In the meantime, other uses have been proposed for the protocol.

External links

• RFC 2960 Stream Control Transmission Protocol
• RFC 3286 An Introduction to the Stream Control Transmission Protocol
• RFC 3257 Stream Control Transmission Protocol Applicability Statement
• RFC 3309 Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) Checksum Change

• http://www.sigtran.org
• http://www.sctp.org
• http://www.openss7.org
• http://www.sctp.de
• The Linux Kernel Stream Control Transmission Protocol (lksctp) project