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SCTP, or Stream Control Transmission Protocol is a new transport layer protocol ( 2000) defined by the IETF. The protocol is defined in RFC 2960, and an introductory text is provided by RFC 3286.
As a transport protocol, SCTP is equivalent in a sense to TCP or UDP. Indeed it provides some similar services as TCP, ensuring reliable, in-sequence transport of messages. Whilst TCP is byte-oriented, SCTP deals with framed messages.
A major contribution of SCTP is multi-homing support, where one (or both) endpoints of a connection can consist of more than one IP address, enabling transparent fail-over between hosts or network cards.
SCTP was originally intended for the transport of telephony ( SS7) protocols over IP, with the goal of duplicating some of the reliability attributes of the SS7 signaling network in IP. This IETF effort is known as SIGTRAN . In the meantime, other uses have been proposed for the protocol.