Facts about Stream Control Transmission Protocol
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Unlike TCP's single data stream, SCTP's multi-streaming capability allows up to 65536 independent streams within one association, each with separate sequencing.
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Selective acknowledgment (SACK) in SCTP enables receivers to report non-contiguous received chunks, allowing senders to retransmit only lost packets rather than all unacknowledged data.
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Congestion control in SCTP uses a congestion window mechanism similar to TCP but independently manages windows for each destination address in multihomed connections.
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Message fragmentation in SCTP automatically segments packets larger than 1500 bytes to accommodate standard Ethernet MTU sizes without requiring application-layer handling.
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Association establishment in SCTP requires exchanging INIT and INIT-ACK chunks containing verification tags to prevent packet injection attacks from unauthorized sources.
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Partial reliability in SCTP allows applications to abandon retransmission of specific messages after a configurable timeout, enabling real-time protocols like VoIP to prioritize timely delivery over perfect reliability.
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SCTP can transmit multiple independent streams over a single association, preventing head-of-line blocking that occurs in TCP when one lost packet delays all subsequent data.
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Four-way handshakes and cookie mechanisms in SCTP protect against SYN flood denial-of-service attacks more effectively than TCP's three-way handshake.
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SCTP supports multihoming, allowing a single connection to utilize multiple IP addresses simultaneously for improved fault tolerance and network redundancy.
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The IETF standardized SCTP in RFC 2960 during 2000 as a reliable message-oriented transport protocol for telecommunications networks.