Stream Control Transmission Protocol Applicability Statement
RFC 3257
|
Document |
Type |
|
RFC - Informational
(April 2002; No errata)
|
|
Last updated |
|
2015-10-14
|
|
Stream |
|
IETF
|
|
Formats |
|
plain text
pdf
html
bibtex
|
Stream |
WG state
|
|
(None)
|
|
Document shepherd |
|
No shepherd assigned
|
|
This information refers to IESG processing after the RFC was initially published: |
IESG |
IESG state |
|
RFC 3257 (Informational)
|
|
Consensus Boilerplate |
|
Unknown
|
|
Telechat date |
|
|
|
Responsible AD |
|
Scott Bradner
|
|
Send notices to |
|
(None)
|
Network Working Group L. Coene
Request for Comments: 3257 Siemens
Category: Informational April 2002
Stream Control Transmission Protocol Applicability Statement
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This document describes the applicability of the Stream Control
Transmission Protocol (SCTP). It also contrasts SCTP with the two
dominant transport protocols, User Datagram Protocol (UDP) &
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and gives some guidelines for
when best to use SCTP and when not best to use SCTP.
Table of contents
1. Introduction .................................................. 2
1.1 Terminology .................................................. 2
2 Transport protocols ............................................ 2
2.1 TCP service model ............................................ 2
2.2 SCTP service model ........................................... 3
2.3 UDP service model ............................................ 4
3 SCTP Multihoming issues ........................................ 4
4 SCTP Network Address Translators (NAT) issues [RFC2663] ........ 5
5 Security Considerations ........................................ 6
5.1 Security issues with TCP ..................................... 6
5.2 Security issues with SCTP .................................... 7
5.3 Security issues with both TCP and SCTP ....................... 8
6 References and related work .................................... 9
7 Acknowledgments ................................................ 10
Appendix A: Major functions provided by SCTP ..................... 11
Editor's Address ................................................. 12
Full Copyright Statement ......................................... 13
Coene Informational [Page 1]
RFC 3257 SCTP Applicability Statement April 2002
1 Introduction
SCTP is a reliable transport protocol [RFC2960], which along with TCP
[RFC793], RTP [RFC1889], and UDP [RFC768], provides transport-layer
services for upper layer protocols and services. UDP, RTP, TCP, and
SCTP are currently the IETF standards-track transport-layer
protocols. Each protocol has a domain of applicability and services
it provides, albeit with some overlaps.
By clarifying the situations where the functionality of these
protocols are applicable, this document can guide implementers and
protocol designers in selecting which protocol to use.
Special attention is given to services SCTP provides which would make
a decision to use SCTP the right one.
Major functions provided by SCTP can be found in Appendix A.
1.1 Terminology
The following terms are commonly identified in this work:
Association: SCTP connection between two endpoints.
Transport address: A combination of IP address and SCTP port number.
Upper layer: The user of the SCTP protocol, which may be an
adaptation layer, a session layer protocol, or the user application
directly.
Multihoming: Assigning more than one IP network interface to a single
endpoint.
2 Transport protocols
2.1 TCP service model
TCP is a connection-oriented (a.k.a., session-oriented) transport
protocol. This means that it requires both the establishment of a
connection prior to the exchange of application data and a connection
tear-down to release system resources after the completion of data
transfer.
TCP is currently the most widely used connection-oriented transport
protocol for the Internet.
Coene Informational [Page 2]
RFC 3257 SCTP Applicability Statement April 2002
TCP provides the upper layer with the following transport services:
- data reliability;
- data sequence preservation; and
- flow and congestion control.
2.2 SCTP service model
SCTP is also connection-oriented and provides all the transport
services that TCP provides. Many Internet applications therefore
should find that either TCP or SCTP will meet their transport
requirements. Note, for applications conscious about processing
cost, there might be a difference in processing cost associated with
running SCTP with only a single ordered stream and one address pair
in comparison to running TCP.
However, SCTP has some additional capabilities that TCP lacks and
This can make SCTP a better choice for some applications and
environments:
- multi-streams support:
SCTP supports the delivery of multiple independent user message
Show full document text