Beneficial gradual deployment of SCTP

The Internet-wide deployment of new protocols such as the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a difficult matter. The employment of SCTP would be beneficial in many cases, but it is a major challenge to enable applications to use the new protocol at both ends, client and server. The prevalence of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which has been established as the dominant transport protocol in today’s Internet, therefore needs to be broken. This master thesis discusses existing solutions and presents a technique for gradually deploying SCTP alongside TCP in two steps. First, it investigates the advantages and disadvantages of replacing a TCP connection with an SCTP association. Second, it demonstrates a new approach which let existing and new applications transparently use SCTP. The goals were to gain information about the benefits of SCTP’s multi-streaming feature and to explore the portability of existing TCP-based applications to SCTP. Practical measurements show that transparent mapping of TCP connections onto SCTP streams is possible and that in certain cases a speedup can be achieved. The results are gained by experimental analysis in a typical small office or home (SOHO) network. Documented benefits and open issues give the reader an outlook on problems that can arise in such environments, as well as a good insight into SCTP multi-streaming application development. This makes this thesis a valuable guide for programmers who consider implementing SCTP based software in such a manner for a productive use in communication systems.