---

IEC

I felt that the International Engineering Consortium did a much better job explaining what Stream Control Transmission Protocol is then I could. For this reason I started this page out with there tutorial on SCTP.

Definition
Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is an end-to-end, connection-oriented protocol that transports data in independent sequenced streams. SCTP endpoints support multi-homing; therefore, interface redundancy is built into the protocol. Through selective transmission mechanisms, SCTP resolves errors and buffers the data transmission process.

Overview of IEC's Tutorial
SCTP provides applications with enhanced performance, reliability, and control functions. This protocol is essential where detection of connection failure and associated monitoring is mandatory. Furthermore, SCTP could be implemented in network systems and applications that deliver voice/data and support quality real-time services (e.g., streaming video and multimedia).

The Signaling Transport (SIGTRAN) group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defines SCTP standards in RFC 2960. The underlying mechanism of SCTP is fairly complex and incorporates a number of validation procedures, path-management practices, and security measures.

This tutorial begins by discussing the evolution of SCTP and continues with an explanation of the fundamental concepts of the protocol. Following the explanation, the discussion elaborates on the unique features that distinguish SCTP from other transport protocols. The tutorial ends by covering the basics of message formats, the data transmission process, and the application programming interface (API) calls.

To learn more about SCTP, visit IEC.

---

Performance Technologies

To reliably transport SS7 messages over IP networks, the Internet Engineering Task force sigtran working group devised the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). SCTP allows the reliable transfer of signaling messages between signaling endpoints in an IP network.

To establish an association between SCTP endpoints, one endpoint provides the other endpoint with a list of its transport addresses (multiple IP addresses in combination with an SCTP port). These transport addresses identify the addresses that will send and receive SCTP packets.

IP signaling traffic is usually composed of many independent message sequences between many different signaling endpoints. SCTP allows signaling messages to be independently ordered within multiple streams (unidirectional logical channels established from one SCTP endpoint to another) to ensure in-sequence delivery between associated endpoints. By transferring independent message sequences in separate SCTP streams, it is less likely that the retransmission of a lost message will affect the timely delivery of other messages in unrelated sequences (called head-of-line blocking). Because TCP/IP does enforce head-of-line blocking, the sigtran Working Group recommends SCTP rather than TCP/IP for the transmission of signaling messages over IP networks.

To learn more about SCTP and how it works, visit Performance Technologies

---

www.sctp.de

This page contains RFCs and Internet Drafts (IDs) that deal with Stream Control Transmission Protocol. Some of the topics covered on this page are:

• Architectural Framework for Signaling Transport

• ISDN Q.921–User Adaptation Layer

• modification of the checksum algorithm for SCTP

• handling multiple IPv6 addresses in the INIT and INIT-ACK chunks

• specifies the adaptation layer to support the primitives at the MTP2/MTP3 boundary in a symmetric scenario

• usage of SCTP outside the SIGTRAN group

This is just a few of the topics covered on this site. The site also contains free source code so you can better implement SCTP on your system.

To learn more about SCTP and how it works, visit www.sctp.de.