This document specifies the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX)
protocol that serves for transmitting IP Traffic Flow information over
the network. In order to transmit IP Traffic Flow information from an
Exporting Process to an information Collecting Process, a common
representation of flow data and a standard means of communicating them
is required. This document describes how the IPFIX Data and Template
Records are carried over a number of transport protocols from an IPFIX
Exporting Process to an IPFIX Collecting Process. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

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Specification of the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) Protocol for the Exchange of IP Traffic Flow Information

This memo describes an extension to the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) that allows an SCTP endpoint to signal to its peer that it should move the cumulative ack point forward. When both sides of an SCTP association support this extension, it can be used by an SCTP implementation to provide partially reliable data transmission service to an upper layer protocol. This memo describes the protocol extensions, which consist of a new parameter for INIT and INIT ACK, and a new FORWARD TSN chunk type, and provides one example of a partially reliable service that can be provided to the upper layer via this mechanism.

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Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) Partial Reliability Extension

The stream control transmission protocol (STCP) is being standardized by the IEFT as a reliable transport protocol to transport SS7signaling messages over IP networks. Due to its attractive features such as multistreaming and multihoming, SCTP has received much attention from the network community, in terms of both research and development. This article introduces the main features of SCTP, and discusses the state of the art in SCTP research and development activities. We also provide a survey of the available products that use SCTP. Finally with a view to stimulating further research in this area, the challenges faced by the SCTP research community are identified.

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SCTP: state of the art in research, products, and technical challenges

For the past 20 years (1980-2000), applications and end users of the TCP/IP suite have employed one of two protocols: the transmission control protocol or the user datagram protocol. Yet some applications already require greater functionality than what either TCP or UDP has to offer, and future applications might require even more. To extend transport layer functionality, the Internet Engineering Task Force approved the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) as a proposed standard in October 2000. SUP was spawned from an effort started in the IETF Signaling Transport (Sigtrans) working group to develop a specialized transport protocol for call control signaling in voice-overt (VoIP) networks. Recognizing that other applications could use some of the new protocol's capabilities, the IETF now embraces SCTP as a general-purpose transport layer protocol, joining TCP and UDP above the IP layer. Like TCP, STCP offers a point-to-point, connection-oriented, reliable delivery transport service for applications communicating over an IP network.

SCTP: new transport protocol for TCP/IP

With the development of mobile communication and Internet technology, there is a strong need to provide connectivity for roaming devices to communicate to other communication end point in the Internet at any time and anywhere. The key issue of this vision is how to support mobility in TCP/IP networks. In this paper, we review the TCP/IP protocol stack and analyze the problems associated with it in a mobile environment. We then investigate the mobility support techniques and existing solutions to provide mobility support in the Internet. We classify the proposed solutions based on the protocol layers and present examples for each category. We also provide a comparison of the different solutions belonging to different categories and in the same category, including their advantages and disadvantages, and conclude that there is no single solution perfectly addresses mobility support for the Internet. We conclude this survey with a recommendation of features that need to be satisfied in Internet mobility support.

A review of mobility support paradigms for the internet

This document describes the usage of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, as defined in RFC 2246, over the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), as defined in RFC 2960 and RFC 3309.

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Transport Layer Security over Stream Control Transmission Protocol

The new general purpose transport protocol SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) has been developed for transport of signaling data, such as Signaling System No. 7 MTP level 2 or 3 user primitives, over IP networks. Since this application has especially high requirements towards the underlying transport protocol concerning reliability and fast recognition and recovery from failures, SCTP-based transmission must provide a high degree of network level fault tolerance. In our contribution we look at a typical link failure scenario in a multi-homed setup, and investigate two options for fast recovery from such an event, namely seamless SCTP switch-over, and a user level switch-over as has been suggested for the MTP Level 2 peer adaptation layer. Moreover, we will analyze necessary parameter settings for fast recovery from the failure situation. 1

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On the Use of SCTP in Failover-Scenarios

Summary IP-based networks grow rapidly and coexist with other universal basic telecommunication infrastructures, namely with the ISDN, mobile networks and ATM networks. Since all infrastructures are capable of carrying all applications and services, there is a growing need for interworking. To be able to transfer signaling traffic originating in the other networks via IP networks, a family of protocols is being defined based on SCTP, a new end-to-end transport protocol. This paper describes some features of SCTP in detail and highlights some advantages over TCP. In addition, a modification of SCTP is proposed and evaluated which significantly enhances the performance in long delay environments.

SCTP – A Multi-link End-to-end Protocol for IP-based Networks

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new general purpose transport protocol defined by the IETF. Originally intended for the transport of voice signaling data (SS7) over IP networks, SCTP together with newly defined extensions is increasingly considered for other application scenarios as well. These require strong security solutions to authenticate the communication partners and protect sensitive data with respect to integrity and confidentiality. Proposals have been issued on how to protect SCTP transport by using standard security protocols such as TLS and IPsec. However, these solutions introduce limitations or inefficiencies und thus may not be able to fully exploit the capabilities of SCTP. Therefore, we propose a security extension to SCTP named Secure SCTP (S-SCTP) to solve these issues in an efficient and user-friendly way.

Secure SCTP --- A Versatile Secure Transport Protocol

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a general purpose transport protocol featuring multi-homing support, message oriented and more flexible data delivery mechanisms than TCP, and an increased protection against well-known attacks. Originally developed for the transport of Signaling System No. 7 messages, e.g. MTP level 3 user primitives, over IP networks, SCTP has evolved to a general purpose transport protocol with a wide field of applications. With respect to multi-homing, the current SCTP standard uses this feature for network level redundancy only. Therefore we propose and evaluate in this contribution mechanisms for the application-specific optimisation of the SCTP protocol behaviour with respect to its multi-homing capabilities. To satisfy the extremely strict performance requirements for signalling transport, efficient load sharing among all active links is also highly desirable in SCTP scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel, improved load sharing algorithm for SCTP with path based selective acknowledgements which avoids some of the drawbacks of the existing algorithms and achieves an increase in throughput. Results of a comparative simulation study are presented to demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm.

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Andreas Jungmaier

Papers

Transport Layer Security over Stream Control Transmission Protocol

On the Use of SCTP in Failover-Scenarios

SCTP – A Multi-link End-to-end Protocol for IP-based Networks

Secure SCTP --- A Versatile Secure Transport Protocol

On SCTP multi-homing performance