The SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is a new reliable transfer protocol standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the documents [1], [2] and [3]. It was primarily developed by the SIGTRAN group to provide a mechanism for transporting currently circuit switched telephony signaling (SS7) data over packet switched networks.

Designed to overcome some deficiencies of TCP, its main benefits are a more flexible, message oriented data delivery to its user, and inherent support for multi-homimng. As such, it is not only a transport protocol for delivery of SS7 signaling data over IP networks, as originally intended. Much rather, it is a general purpose transport protocol, suitable for any kind of message oriented traffic (e.g. Internet file transfer, SCSI over IP, SIP, HTTP, etc.), and thus a successor to TCP.

Together with enhancements to the core protocol (as per [4] and [5]), features for mobility of SCTP endpoints and multimedia transmissions can be added to SCTP implementations.

So far, major operating systems vendors started integrating SCTP into their protocol stacks, among these Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Cisco IOS, and many more.

This presentation will be about the features of the core protocol, and explain the protocol enhancements for transport layer mobility and partial reliability. Security solutions using IPSec or TLS [6] will also be covered.