SCTP in battlefield networks

Abstract

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new Internet standards track transport layer protocol SCTP was originally designed to transport PSTN signaling messages over IP networks, but is also capable of serving as a general purpose transport protocol. As such, SCTP provides an alternative that may be better able to satisfy the requirements of future battlefield networks than the traditional transport protocols, TCP and UDP. 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. SCTP also provides features for multi-homing that may be helpful in high-mobility environments and additional security against denial-of-service attacks based on SYN flooding.