SCTP Performance in Data Center Environments

Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is gaining more & more attention as a potential replacement for the aging TCP owing to several powerful features it provides. However, like TCP, much of SCTP work relates to WAN. In this paper, we examine SCTP from the data center perspective. In particular, we evaluate the most mature open source implementation of SCTP for Linux known as LK-SCTP. We find that the implementation is rather inefficient and can be improved substantially via a small number of targeted optimizations, many of which are approached from data center perspective. We also show that the protocol itself suffers from a number of weaknesses, which must be fixed in order for SCTP to become a preferred data center protocol.