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SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is a reliable
transport protocol operating on top of a connectionless
packet network such as IP. SCTP was developed by SIGTRAN
working group for the purpose of transporting signaling
information over IP network but it is a general-purpose
protocol capable of supporting a variety of applications.
SCTP has inherited some features of TCP and added some
more features like Multiple Stream support for avoiding
head of the line blocking, Multiple IP addresses per
association for increased Network fault tolerance etc.
Overview of SCTP can be viewed in the SCTP overview
draft ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3286.txt
Current Applications
- SIGTRAN: Various adaptations layers defined
by SIGTRAN working group (M2UA, M2PA, IUA, M3UA, SUA
and V5UA) are using SCTP. Network positioning of SIGTRAN
protocol suite can be viewed here
- SCTP as transport for SIP (please refer to
IETF draft sip-sctp version 03)
- SCTP as transport for Megaco: ITU H.248,
Annex H dated Nov 2000
- Some of the existing TCP based
applications are also being ported to SCTP
Ongoing Work
Some of the ongoing work in IETF related to SCTP includes
- Defining MIB support for SCTP (please refer to IETF
draft sigtran-sctp-mib version 10 )
- Proposing update to the standard socket interface
for SCTP support (please refer to IETF draft tsvwg-sctpsocket
version 08 )
- Defining support for dynamic addition/deletion of
IP addresses in an SCTP association (please refer
to IETF draft tsvwg-addip-sctp version 9)
- SCTP checksum to be updated from Adler-32 to CRC-32c
(please refer to IETF draft tsvwg-sctpcsum version
07 )
- SCTP implementation Guide (please refer to IETF
draft tsvwg-sctpimpguide version 9)
- IPSec support in the SCTP protocol. <RFC 3436>
- Extension to Support partial reliability of Data
Messages <RFC 3758t>
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