M ost Internet protocol-based networks employ either the transmission control protocol (TCP) or the user datagram protocol (UDP) for data transfer. However, these two general-purpose protocols provide disjointed services and do not ideally satisfy all application needs. The general-purpose stream control transmission protocol is designed to expand the scope beyond TCP and UDP. SCTP evolved from a telephony signaling protocol for IP networks. 1 Today it is a proposed Internet Engineering Task

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... ce standard (RFC 2960). 2 Like TCP, SCTP provides a reliable, full-duplex connection and mechanisms to control network congestion. Unlike both TCP and UDP, however, SCTP offers new delivery options that are particularly desirable for telephony signaling and multimedia applications. Table 1 compares SCTP's services and features with those of TCP and UDP. An SCTP connection, called an association, provides novel services such as multihoming, which allows the end points of a single association to have multiple IP addresses, and multistreaming, which allows for independent delivery among data streams. SCTP also features a fourway handshake to establish an association, which makes it resistant to blind denial-of-service attacks and thus improves overall protocol security. The stream control transmission protocol is a new standard for generalpurpose transport proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. SCTP addresses application and security gaps left open by its predecessors, TCP and UDP.