What is SCTP?
SCTP – Stream control transport protocol is a transport layer protocol just like TCP and UDP.
The protocol was defined by the IETF Signaling Transport (SIGTRAN) working group in 2000,and is maintained by the IETF Transport Area (TSVWG) working group.
- SCTP is a unicast protocol, and supports data exchange between exactly 2 endpoints, although these may be represented by multiple IP addresses.
- SCTP provides reliable transmission, detecting when data is discarded, reordered, duplicated or corrupted, and retransmitting damaged data as necessary.
- SCTP transmission is full duplex.
- SCTP is message oriented and supports framing of individual message boundaries. In comparison, TCP is byte oriented and does not preserve any implicit structure within a transmitted byte stream without enhancement.
- SCTP is rate adaptive similar to TCP, and will scale back data transfer to the prevailing load conditions in the network. It is designed to behave cooperatively with TCP sessions attempting to use the same bandwidth.
