Performance Comparison of SCTP and TCP over Linux Platform

This paper compares throughput performance of TCP and SCTP in a variety of network environments. For experiments, we construct a Linux-based testbed and consider a set of performance metrics such as MSS(Maximum Segment Size), transmission delay, and packet loss rate. In addition, we analyze the effect of SCTP multi-streaming on throughput. From the experimental results, we can see that SCTP provides throughput gain of approximately over TCP. This performance gain comes from the distinctive features of SCTP such as chunk bundling, initial congestion window of 2 MTU and SACK(Selective ACK) based error control. In the lossy networks, we can see that SCTP multi-streaming transmissions can effectively overcome the so-called HoLB(Head-of-Line Blocking) phenomenon of TCP.