SCTP: a proposed standard for robust Internet data transport

The stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is an evolving general purpose Internet transport protocol designed to bridge the gap between TCP and UDP. SCTP evolved from a telephony signaling protocol for IP networks and is now a proposed standard with the Internet Engineering Task Force. Like TCP, SCTP provides a reliable, full-duplex connection and mechanisms to control network congestion. However, SCTP expands transport layer possibilities beyond TCP and UDP, offering new delivery options that are particularly desirable for telephony signaling and multimedia applications.     

SCTP: What, Why, and How

Similar to TCP and UDP, the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is a transport protocol providing end-to-end communication. SCTP was originally designed within the IETF Signaling Transport (SIGTRAN) working group to address TCP's shortcomings relating to telephony signaling over IP networks. SCTP has since evolved into a general-purpose IETF transport protocol with kernel implementations on various platforms. Similar to TCP, SCTP provides a connection-oriented, reliable, full- duplex, congestion and flow-controlled layer 4 channel. Unlike both TCP and UDP, however, SCTP offers new delivery options that better match diverse applications' needs. Here, we introduce SCTP, discuss its innovative services, and outline ongoing SCTP-related research and standardization activities.     

SCTP: new transport protocol for TCP/IP

For the past 20 years (1980-2000), applications and end users of the TCP/IP suite have employed one of two protocols: the transmission control protocol or the user datagram protocol. Yet some applications already require greater functionality than what either TCP or UDP has to offer, and future applications might require even more. To extend transport layer functionality, the Internet Engineering Task Force approved the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) as a proposed standard in October 2000. SUP was spawned from an effort started in the IETF Signaling Transport (Sigtrans) working group to develop a specialized transport protocol for call control signaling in voice-over-IP (VoIP) networks. Recognizing that other applications could use some of the new protocol's capabilities, the IETF now embraces SCTP as a general-purpose transport layer protocol, joining TCP and UDP above the IP layer. Like TCP, STCP offers a point-to-point, connection-oriented, reliable delivery transport service for applications communicating over an IP network     

SCTP传输MPEG4视频流的性能分析

为了在IP分组网络上传输N0.7信令，IETF信令传输工作组专门制定了流量控制传输协议(SCTP)。该文对SCTP与TCP进行了比较，分析了CCTP适合于信令和多媒体传输的特性，研究了用SCTP传输MPEG4视频流的性能，并进行了仿真和分析。最后讨论了SCTP其它的一些可能的应用。     

Modeling and performance evaluation of transport protocols for firewall control

Firewalls are a crucial building block for securing IP networks. The usage of out-of-band signaling protocols such as SIP for IP telephony and multimedia applications requires a dynamic control of these firewalls and imposes several challenges. Recently, several firewall control architectures and protocols have been developed. The main focus of this paper is the simple middlebox configuration protocol (SIMCO), which is a new transaction-based firewall control protocol. Due to the impact on call setup delays, firewall signaling requires small end-to-end delays and thus mandates a careful choice of the transport protocol. Therefore, this paper studies SCTP, TCP and UDP-based transport for SIMCO and compares different configurations that allow to optimize the performance. We present an analytical model to quantify the impact of head-of-line blocking in SCTP and TCP and verify it with measurements. Both the model and measurements reveal that SCTP can significantly reduce the SIMCO response times by leveraging transmission over multiple parallel streams. While already a few SCTP streams can almost completely avoid head-of-line blocking, our results show that TCP- and UDP-based transport may suffer from significantly larger delays.     

SCTP传输性能研究

流控制传输协议SCTP是一种新型的传输层协议,主要用于在IP网上传输PSTN信令。将SCTP与TCP、UDP在一般的网络环境下进行了比较,发现SCTP的传输性能与TCP、UDP的相差甚远;同时将SCTP不同流数下的传输性能进行了比较,发现SCTP的传输性能与传输数据的流数、传输的数据量之间存在关系。基于实验数据,分析了SCTP与TCP、UDP在传输性能方面的差距的可能原因,并提出了相应的解决方法。     

Evaluating TCP-friendliness in light of Concurrent Multipath Transfer

In prior work, a CMT protocol using SCTP multihoming (termed SCTP-based CMT) was proposed and investigated for improving application throughput. SCTP-based CMT was studied in (bottleneck-independent) wired networking scenarios with ns-2 simulations. This paper studies the TCP-friendliness of CMT in the Internet. In this paper, we surveyed historical developments of the TCP-friendliness concept and argued that the original TCP-friendliness doctrine should be extended to incorporate multihoming and SCTP-based CMT.Since CMT is based on (single-homed) SCTP, we first investigated TCP-friendliness of single-homed SCTP. We discovered that although SCTP’s congestion control mechanisms were intended to be “similar” to TCP’s, being a newer protocol, SCTP specification has some of the proposed TCP enhancements already incorporated which results in SCTP performing better than TCP. Therefore, SCTP obtains larger share of the bandwidth when competing with a TCP flavor that does not have similar enhancements. We concluded that SCTP is TCP-friendly, but achieves higher throughput than TCP, due to SCTP’s better loss recovery mechanisms just as TCP-SACK and TCP-Reno perform better than TCP-Tahoe.We then investigated the TCP-friendliness of CMT. Via QualNet simulations, we found out that one two-homed CMT association has similar or worse performance (for smaller number of competing TCP flows) than the aggregated performance of two independent, single-homed SCTP associations while sharing the link with other TCP connections, for the reason that a CMT flow creates a burstier data traffic than independent SCTP flows. When compared to the aggregated performance of two-independent TCP connections, one two-homed CMT obtains a higher share of the tight link bandwidth because of better loss recovery mechanisms in CMT. In addition, sharing of ACK information makes CMT more resilient to losses. Although CMT obtains higher throughput than two independent TCP flows, CMT’s AIMD-based congestion control mechanism allows other TCP flows to co-exist in the network. Therefore, we concluded that CMT is TCP-friendly, similar to two TCP-Reno flows are TCP-friendly when compared to two TCP-Tahoe flows.     

SCTP与TCP的比较分析

随着VoIP和第3代移动通信的发展，SCTP协议的使用将会越来越多。从分组结构、安全性、多归属、流、数据的发送和接收等几个方面对SCTP和TCP进行了分析比较。说明了为什么SCTP比TCP更适合传送PSTN信令。     

基于SCTP协议的并行多路径传输研究

SCTP协议是IEFT信令组提出的一种面向多媒体通信的流控制传输协议,是继TCP、UDP协议之后的一种新兴的传输层协议。它的诸多新特性具有很广泛的研究价值,其中的多宿主特性开辟了并行多路径传输的新空间。分析了SCTP协议的多宿主特性以及并行多路径传输（CMT）关键技术和目前存在的问题。     

流控制传输协议传输流媒体性能研究

SCTP协议（Stream Control Transmission Protocol）是一种面向报文的、可靠的传输层协议。它基于不可靠的、无连接的分组IP网络,具有多宿（multi-homing）和多流（multi-streaming）等特性。通过仿真的方法分析,证实SCTP在支持实时多媒体网络应用时的许多性能参数明显优于传统的TCP和UDP,包括数据包投递率、带宽开销、端到端延迟、延迟抖动等。在此基础上,探讨一个适合在流媒体应用中,能够有效提高流媒体传输质量的策略。     

一种基于SCTP的嵌入式Linux系统高性能数据传输的方法

SCTP属于传输层协议,提供了多宿主、多流等特性,解决了TCP带来的头端阻塞问题和UDP的安全可靠性问题。本文主要介绍了SCTP传输层协议在嵌入式Linux下的实现并设计了一种基于SCTP协议的嵌入式Linux系统之间的高性能数据传输的方法,特别在网络环境不理想的状况下,能获得更好的传输性能。     

基于SCTP的移动Internet建模与仿真

分析了移动Internet传输的特点和SCTP协议的相关特性,在此基础上提出了基于SCTP的移动Internct传输模型。依据此模型,讨论了SCTP多宿、多流等特性在无线条件下对移动Internet接入性能的影响,并与TCP协议下的传输性能进行了对比仿真。仿真结果表明：在无线链路和特定的应用层协议下,相对于TCP,基于SCTP的传输能够明显减小时延并充分保障传输的可靠性,可为移动Internet接入业务提供更有力的支持。     

DCCP partial reliability extension with sequence number compensation

Datagram congestion control protocol (DCCP), possessing congestion control and unreliable transmission, specially suits real-time multimedia applications. Nevertheless, losses of key packets will cause a substantial decline on quality of services (QoS) in some applications. This paper proposes a DCCP partial reliability extension (PR-DCCP) that can retransmit lost packets as needed. Since DCCP uses an incremental sequence number, the retransmitted packets cannot utilize their original sequence number. To solve this problem, PR-DCCP adopts sequence number compensation, which appends an offset to the retransmitted packet; thus the receiver can use the sequence number of this retransmitted packet and the attached offset so as to re-obtain the original sequence number. The simulation uses two performance metrics: decodable frame ratio (DFR) representing QoS, and useless data received ratio (UDRR) representing the bandwidth waste. These are used to evaluate different transport protocols, namely, PR-DCCP, DCCP, SCTP, TCP, and UDP. Simulation results show that PR-DCCP has the better DFR and UDRR than other transport protocols in almost all cases. For various movies, a DFR of PR-DCCP is 1.2–12.4% higher than that of DCCP; while UDRR is lower by 73.2–85.1%. Furthermore, two reliability policies to determine which packets require reliability are investigated. Finally, the comparisons between PR-DCCP and PR-SCTP are examined.     

Hiding information in a Stream Control Transmission Protocol

The STCP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is a candidate for a new transport layer protocol that may replace the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) protocols in future IP networks. Currently, the SCTP is implemented in, or can be added to, many popular operating systems (Windows, BSD, Linux, HP-UX or Sun Solaris). This paper identifies and presents the most likely “places” where hidden information can be exchanged using an SCTP. The paper focuses mostly on proposing new steganographic methods that can be applied to an SCTP and that can utilise new, characteristic SCTP features, such as multi-homing and multi-streaming. Moreover, for each method, the countermeasure is covered. When used with malicious intent, a method may pose a threat to network security. Knowledge about potential SCTP steganographic methods may be used as a supplement to RFC5062, which describes security attacks in an SCTP protocol. Presented in this paper is a complete analysis of information hiding in an SCTP, and this analysis can be treated as a “guide” when developing steganalysis (detection) tools.     

小设备上IPv4/v6双协议栈的TCP模块的设计与实现

介绍了一个基于小设备(LCNA)的无操作系统支持的IPv4/v6双协议栈,涉及到内存管理,着重于TCP模块的设计和实现.详细介绍了针对小设备硬件资源有限的特性而对TCP模块(TCP输入模块,TCP输出模块和定时器模块)所做的设计以及相应的实现,包括几个TCP头部选项的特殊处理,重组队列的设计和优化,校验和的省略,定时器的管理和维护等等.     

cookie思想在TCP与SCTP中的应用

典型的Dos攻击一SYN flood一对于使用传统TCP协议的网络服务来说是一个很头疼的问题，应对这个问题的一个有效方案是Bernstein提出的SYN cookies方法，而SCTP也使用了类似的机制。本文将探讨TCP与SCTP中是怎样利用cookie的思想来防范Dos攻击的，并用实验比较TCP与SCTP在抵御Dos攻击时的实际性能。     

Improving SCTP retransmission delays for time-dependent thin streams

A large number of network services rely on IP and reliable transport protocols. For applications that provide abundant data for transmission, loss is usually handled satisfactorily, even if the application is latency-sensitive (Wang et al. 2004). For data streams where small packets are sent intermittently, however, applications can occasionally experience extreme latencies (Griwodz and Halvorsen 2006). As it is not uncommon that such thin-stream applications are time-dependent, any unnecessarily induced delay can have severe consequences for the service provided. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are a defining example of thin streams. Many MMOGs (like World of Warcraft and Age of Conan) use TCP for the benefits of reliability, in-order delivery and NAT/firewall traversal. It has been shown that TCP has several shortcomings with respect to the latency requirements of thin streams because of the way it handles retransmissions (Griwodz and Halvorsen 2006). As such, an alternative to TCP may be SCTP (Stewart et al. 2000), which was originally developed to meet the requirements of signaling transport. In this paper, we evaluate the Linux-kernel SCTP implementation in the context of thin streams. To address the identified latency challenges, we propose sender-side only enhancements that reduce the application-layer latency in a manner that is compatible with unmodified receivers. These enhancements can be switched on by applications and are used only when the system identifies the stream as thin. To evaluate the latency performance, we have performed several tests over various real networks and over an emulated network, varying parameters like RTT, packet loss and amount of competing cross traffic. When comparing our modifications with SCTP on Linux and FreeBSD and TCP New Reno, our results show great latency improvements and indicate the need for a separate handling of thin and thick streams.     

cookie思想在TCP与SCTP中的应用

典型的Dos攻击—SYNflood—对于使用传统TCP协议的网络服务来说是一个很头疼的问题,应对这个问题的一个有效方案是Bernstein提出的SYNcookies方法,而SCTP也使用了类似的机制。本文将探讨TCP与SCTP中是怎样利用cookie的思想来防范Dos攻击的,并用实验比较TCP与SCTP在抵御Dos攻击时的实际性能。     

Performance analysis and improvement of PR-SCTP for small messages

PR-SCTP, a partially reliable extension of SCTP, provides a flexible QoS trade-off between timeliness and reliability for application traffic. However, the performance of PR-SCTP can be affected by certain traffic characteristics and network scenarios. We previously proposed an NR-SACK based optimization for PR-SCTP. In this work, we extensively evaluate and analyze the performance of PR-SCTP with NR-SACKs using different network scenarios. Moreover, we compare the performance of our NR-SACK based PR-SCTP with existing transport protocols for syslog traffic. In the evaluation, we use real syslog traces from an operational syslog system. The results indicate that NR-SACK based PR-SCTP significantly improves the overall message transfer delay as compared to SCTP and TCP.     

基于SCTP的客户/服务器的设计与实现

随着IP网向多业务网的发展,新一代运输层协议SCTP会逐渐替代TCP在下一代网络中获得更加广泛的应用。分析了SCTP/IP协议栈中数据传输过程,介绍了SCTP协议所提供给开发人员的套接口编程模型,并给出一个在Uinx/Linux系统上利用一到多形式套接口模型开发客户/服务器应用的示例。