SCTP -stream control transmission protocol

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SCTP: Stream Control Transmission Protocol

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), a part of the Signalling Transport (SIGTRAN) protocol family, was designed to transport PSTN signalling messages over IP networks, but is capable of broader applications. SCTP is a reliable transport protocol operating on top of a connectionless packet network such as IP. SCTP is designed to address the limitations and complexity of TCP while transporting real time signaling and data such as PSTN SS7/C7 signaling over IP network. SCTP can also run on top of the UDP layer.

SCTP offers the following services:

• acknowledged error-free non-duplicated transfer of user data,
• data fragmentation to conform to discovered path MTU size,
• sequenced delivery of user messages within multiple streams, with an option for order-of-arrival delivery of individual user messages,
• optional bundling of multiple user messages into a single SCTP packet, and
• network-level fault tolerance through supporting of multi homing at either or both ends of an association.

The design of SCTP includes appropriate congestion avoidance behavior and resistance to flooding and masquerade attacks. The SCTP datagram is comprised of a common header and chunks. The chunks contain either control information or user data.

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), a core protocol in the SIGTRAN protocol stack, provides transport layer services over IP for SS7/C7. Examples of such transport include: transport of signaling between a Signaling Gateway and Media Gateway or Media Gateway Controller; transport of signaling ("backhaul") from a Media Gateway to a Media Gateway Controller; transport of TCAP between a Signaling Gateway and other IP nodes.

SCTP has also other non-signalling applications such as:

o Transport of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) information.

o Transport of Block Storage traffic (examples SCSI, Fibre Channel...)

o Transport of Remote Direct Data Placement traffic.

o Transport of Reliable Server poolling traffic.

o Transport of IP Flow information export traffic.  

 

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Protocol Structure - SCTP: Stream Control Transmission Protocol

16	32bit
Source Port Number	Destination Port Number
Verification Tag
Checksum

• Source Port Number - SCTP sender's port number. It can be used by the receiver, in combination with the source IP Address, to identify the association to which this datagram belongs.
• Destination Port Number - Destination port number where SCTP datagram intended to go. The receiving host will use this port number to de-multiplex the SCTP datagram to the correct receiving endpoint/application.
• Verification Tag - The receiver uses the Verification tag to identify the association. On transmit, the value of this Verification tag must be set to the value of the Initiate tag received from the peer endpoint during the association initialization.
• Checksum - This field contains an Adler-32 checksum on this SCTP datagram.

Related Protocols
UDP , TCP , IP , SS7/C7, SIGTRAN

Sponsor Source

SCTP is defined by IETF (http://www.ietf.org ) in RFC 2690.