SCTP vs. TCP : comparing packets loss rate of transport protocols in best-effort networks

Abstract EN

With its new features such as multi-homing, multi-streaming, and enhanced security, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has become a promising candidate to join UDP and TCP as a generalpurpose transport layer protocol.

However, the challenge faced by SCTP in the best-effort network, where the network does not provide any Quality of Service (QoS) for the upper layer.

The objective of this research are to measure the performance of both TCP and SCTP over a wired network in term of packet loss rate in a network environment that has SCTP with UDP traffic, and then compare SCTP and TCP performance results.

All experiments have been done through the network simulation NS2.

The result indicates that the SCTP traffic had a highest packet loss rate than TCP traffic under similar conditions.