Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

SCTP: designed for timely message delivery?

  • Published:
Telecommunication Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

To reduce cost and provide more flexible services, telecommunication operators are currently replacing traditional telephony networks with IP-networks. To support the requirements of telephony signaling in IP-networks, SCTP was standardized. SCTP solves a number of problems that follows from using TCP for telephony signaling transport. However, the design of SCTP is still largely based on TCP, and most of SCTP’s data transmission mechanisms are inherited from TCP. Signaling traffic has stricter requirements of timely delivery than TCP bulk traffic. However, such requirements are not supported optimally by the inherited TCP mechanisms. We therefore argue that SCTP is not fully designed for timely message delivery. In this article we present and evaluate two loss recovery adaptations that enhance the timeliness of SCTP: Early Retransmit and a modified RTO management algorithm. In addition, we evaluate an adapted Nagle-like algorithm. The results from our evaluations show a significant reduction of message delivery times. Using our loss recovery enhancements, delivery times were typically reduced with at least 30–50%. Furthermore, in some situations, message delivery times were reduced with up to 70%, using the modified Nagle algorithm. In addition to this, we evaluate all the proposals together under realistic conditions, with very good results.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Allman, M., Avrachenkov, K., Ayesta, U., Blanton, J., & Hurtig, P. (2010). Early retransmit for TCP and SCTP. RFC 5827, Internet Engineering Task Force, April 2010.

  2. Braden, R. (1989). Requirements for Internet hosts—communication layers. RFC 1122, Internet Engineering Task Force, October 1989.

  3. Caro, A. Jr., Amer, P., & Stewart, R. (2004). End-to-end failover thresholds for transport layer multihoming. In IEEE military communications conference (MILCOMM 2004), October 2004.

  4. Ekström, H., & Ludwig, R. (2004). The peak-hopper: A new end-to-end retransmission timer for reliable unicast transport. In Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM.

  5. Garcia, J., Conchon, E., Perennou, T., & Brunstrom, A. (2007). KauNet: improving reproducibility for wireless and mobile research. In Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on system evaluation for mobile platforms, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

  6. Hurtig, P., & Brunstrom, A. (2008). Enhancing SCTP loss recovery: An experimental evaluation of early retransmit. Computer Communications, 31(16), 3778–3788.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Hurtig, P., & Brunstrom, A. (2008). Improved loss detection for signaling traffic in SCTP. In Proceedings of the international conference on communications (ICC’08), Beijing, China, May 2008.

  8. IBM Corporation. The lksctp project. http://lksctp.sourceforge.net.

  9. Ludwig, R., & Sklower, K. (2000). The Eifel retransmission timer. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 30(3), 17–27.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Minshall, G. (1999). A suggested modification to Nagle’s algorithm. Expired Internet draft, Internet Engineering Task Force, June 1999. draft-minshall-nagle-01.

  11. Mogul, J. C., & Minshall, G. (2001). Rethinking the TCP Nagle algorithm. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 31(1), 6–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Nagle, J. (1984). Congestion control in IP/TCP internetworks. RFC 896, Internet Engineering Task Force, January.

  13. Ong, L., Rytina, I., Garcia, M., Schwarzbauer, H., Coene, L., Lin, H., Juhasz, I., Holdrege, M., & Sharp, C. (1999). Framework architecture for signaling transport. RFC 2719, Internet Engineering Task Force, October 1999.

  14. Paxson, V. (1997). End-to-end Internet packet dynamics. In ACM SIGCOMM ’97, volume 27,4 of CCR, pp. 139–154, Cannes, France, September 1997. ACM Press.

  15. Paxson, V., & Allman, M. (2000). Computing TCP’s retransmission timer. RFC 2988, Internet Engineering Task Force, November 2000.

  16. Petlund, A., Beskow, P., Pedersen, J., Paaby, E. S., Griwodz, C., & Halvorsen, P. (2009). Improving SCTP retransmission delays for time-dependent thin streams. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 45(1–3), 33–60.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Rizzo, L. (1997). Dummynet: a simple approach to the evaluation of network protocols. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 27(1), 31–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Rüngeler, I., Tüxen, M., & Rathgeb, E. P. (2009). Congestion and flow control in the context of the message-oriented protocol SCTP. In Proceedings of the 8th international IFIP-TC 6 networking conference (Networking’09), pp. 468–481, Aachen, Germany, May 2009.

  19. Savage, S., Cardwell, N., Wetherall, D., & Anderson, T. (1999). TCP congestion control with a misbehaving receiver. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 29(5), 71–78.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Stewart, R. (2007). Stream control transmission protocol. RFC 4960, Internet Engineering Task Force, September 2007.

  21. Stewart, R., Poon, K., Tuexen, M., Yasevich, V., & Lei, P. (2010). Sockets API extensions for stream control transmission protocol (SCTP). Internet draft, Internet Engineering Task Force, March 2010. draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctpsocket-22.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Karlstad University, 651 88, Karlstad, Sweden

    Per Hurtig & Anna Brunstrom

Authors
  1. Per Hurtig
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Anna Brunstrom
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Per Hurtig.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Hurtig, P., Brunstrom, A. SCTP: designed for timely message delivery?. Telecommun Syst 47, 323–336 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-010-9321-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-010-9321-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation