Improving Multimedia Performance over Lossy Networks via SCTP

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new Internet standards track transport layer protocol. SCTP was designed to transport PSTN signaling messages over IP networks, but SCTP is also capable of serving as a generalized transport protocol. As such, SCTP provides an alternative to the traditional transport protocols, TCP and UDP, that may be better able to satisfy the requirements of future battleeeld networks. Unlike traditional transport protocols, SCTP allows multiple streams of messages within a single connection (or, in SCTP terminology, a single association). As the results in this paper show, this ability is particularly helpful in reducing latency for streaming multimedia in high loss environments. a