Applying PR-SCTP to transport SIP traffic

With the proliferation of multimedia applications over the Internet, which employ the session initiation protocol (SIP) for session management signaling, efficient transport of SIP traffic becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we propose a scheme to effectively apply the partial reliability extension of the stream control transmission protocol (PR-SCTP) to transport SIP traffic over the Internet. In the proposed scheme, SIP messages are sent with partially reliable or unreliable PR-SCTP transport according to their types and requirements, and both application and transport layer retransmission mechanisms are properly coordinated to efficiently retransmit lost data. Simulation results show that, compared with UDP and SCTP, the proposed scheme employing PR-SCTP improves the performance of SIP transport under both high and low levels of SIP traffic