Performance Evaluation of SCTP as a Transport Layer Protocol

Abstract: TCP and UDP are the most popular transport protocols used for end-end data transmission. The rapid growth of internet leads to development of many innovative applications in the current environment. Depending on the functionality of these applications, requirements of transport protocols are changing. TCP is known for its problems with Head Of Line blocking (HOL) and SYN attacks which gives reduced performance, and also doesn’t support Multi-Homing. SCTP is another transport layer protocol similar to TCP which provides end-end communication. It has some unique features like support for Multi-homing and multi-streaming. It also protects better from SYN attacks by using four-way hand shake mechanism during association establishment. As an extension to SCTP, CMT-SCTP was proposed to take full advantage of a multi-homed host by doing load sharing over multiple paths. SCTP is believed to be a next generation transport protocol. This thesis gives an overview of the SCTP protocol and its features focusing on analysing and testing of failover mechanisms provided by SCTP in multi-homed host, evaluating the transmission performance of SCTP vs TCP in a real network environment. This report also gives a theoretical analysis on how SCTP can mitigate SYN attacks by using four-way handshake mechanism and the state of art of CMT-SCTP.