Performance evaluation of SCTP protocol for Smart Grid environment

Smart Grid Communication network will be a network of networks and with the obvious evolution and acceleration, it is crucial for its success to rely on a solid transmission protocol among its peripherals due to its real time streaming. The SCTP protocol, which was initially designed for transporting signaling messages over IP networks, is now an established in many modern applications. The main purpose of designing the Stream Control Protocol (SCTP) was to offer a robust transfer of traffic between the hosts over the networks. For this reason SCTP multi-homing feature was designed, in which an SCTP sender can access destination host with multiple IP addresses in the same session. In this paper we propose a new approach to employ the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) in a smart grid communication, by using the two very significant characteristics offered by SCTP multi-homing and multi-streaming respectively. The simulation results show the comparison between two protocols of the transport layer, TCP and SCTP in terms of the throughput and delay. As we obtain results, we argue that smart grid operators should rely on SCTP as a feasible transmission protocol instead of TCP. All the simulation works have been conducted in NS2 network simulator. KeywordsSmart Grid, SCTP, multi-homing, multi-streaming.