SCTP - DataTAG

This website presents the DataTAG project activity on the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). This exciting new transport protocol was named one of the Top 10 Hottest Technologies of 2001 by Telecommunications Magazine and is considered to be a rival to TCP. Designed by Randall Stewart and Qiaobing Xie, SCTP was intended initially for Internet telephony, but now has developed into a robust general purpose transport protocol.

In High Energy Physics, the preferred platform for running Grid applications is Linux. Consequently, we studied the performance of the only two Linux implementations of SCTP that were publicly available at the time this study was performed: LKSCTP and OpenSS7. The results of the performance tests presented here were gathered using an LKSCTP-enabled Linux kernel and a slightly modified version of iperf-1.6.5. To perform these tests, we used the DataTAG transatlantic gigabit testbed between Geneva and Chicago. Work on OpenSS7 required a major rewrite of iperf and is still ongoing.

Newcomers to SCTP may want to read a short SCTP primer. SCTP for beginners also provides a very good introduction to SCTP. The useful material page includes various reports and presentations that can be useful while building a background in SCTP. You can also download actual implementations of SCTP for various platforms from this site.

This research activity is part of WP3, task 3.3 of the EU-funded DataTAG project. This work was performed by Asim Iqbal from Imperial College, London, UK during his six-month internship at CERN in 2003. If you have questions about this Web site, please contact us.