Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)
- SCTP is designed as a general-purpose transport layer protocol that can handle multimedia and stream traffic, which are increasing every day on the Internet.
Note: SCTP is a message-oriented, reliable protocol that combines the best features of UDP and TCP.
- We briefly compare UDP, TCP, and SCTP:
? UDP is a message-oriented protocol. A process delivers a message to UDP, which is encapsulated in a user datagram and sent over the network. UDP conserves the message boundaries; each message is independent from any other message. UDP is unreliable; the sender cannot know the destiny of messages sent. A message can be lost, duplicated, or received out of order. UDP also lacks some other features, such as congestion control and flow control, needed for a friendly transport-layer protocol.
? TCP is a byte-oriented protocol. It receives a message or messages from a process, stores them as a stream of bytes, and sends them in segments. There is no preservation of the message boundaries. However, TCP is a reliable protocol. The duplicate segments are detected, the lost segments are resent, and the bytes are delivered to the end process in order. TCP also has congestion control and flow control mechanisms.
? SCTP combines the best features of UDP and TCP. SCTP is a reliable message-oriented protocol. It preserves the message boundaries and at the same time detects lost data, duplicate data, and out-of-order data. It also has congestion control and flow control mechanisms.