Stream Control Transmission Protocol Applicability Statement
RFC 3257
Document | Type | RFC - Informational (April 2002; No errata) | |
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Author | Lode Coene | ||
Last updated | 2015-10-14 | ||
Stream | IETF | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized 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) | |
Action Holders |
(None)
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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 messageShow full document text