Performance Comparison of SCTP and TCP over Linux Platform

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is the third transport layer protocol next to TCP and UDP. The SCTP provides some distinctive features over the TCP. This paper is purposed to compare SCTP and TCP in the performance perspective. We compare the throughput of SCTP and TCP for the three different test scenarios: the performance comparison of SCTP and TCP for the different size of the user input data for the socket system call, the analysis of the fairness under competition of SCTP and TCP traffic, and the performance comparison of the SCTP multi-homing and single-homing cases. From the results, it is shown that the SCTP provides better throughput over TCP for a larger user input data. We also see that the SCTP traffic tends to compete fairly with TCP and that the multi-homing SCTP provides better performance than the single-homing case.