摘要：Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a reliable connection-oriented transport protocol which is very similar to the well-known and widely used Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). As TCP, STCP implements congestion and flow control, detection of data corruption, loss or duplication of data and supports a selective retransmission mechanism. In addition it makes it possible to benefit from improved features such as the handling of multi-streams to implement transport network redundancy easily and avoid head-of-line blocking or multi-homing. There have been some debates in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3 GPP) working groups on which transport protocol would be the most suitable for the control plane of future networks generation such as Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced) networks to support signaling message exchange between network nodes. LTE-Advanced represents the next generation in systems of wireless communication s which aim to accomplish main advance of the current third generation systems, by reaching to uplink (UL) rate of 500 Mbps and to 1Gbps in downlink (DL). To achieve this goal, the society of 3GPP is presently evolving LTE-Advanced as a development of the standard of LTE. SCTP is an end-to-end transport protocol that provides services heretofore unavailable from either of the workhorse transport protocols that have supported the Internet for more than twenty years: reliable, connection-oriented TCP or unreliable. This study offers an overview to employing SCTP over LTE-Advanced networks and analyzes the key features of this protocol and its role when applies over next generation communications systems.
