Performance of SCTP for IPTV Applications

Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is a new reliable transport layer protocol. This paper analyzes the performance of the SCTP for IPTV applications using the SCTP distinctive features such as partial-reliable SCTP (PR-SCTP) and multi-streaming. From the experimental results, it is shown that the PR-SCTP provides better goodput than TCP and better quality of services than UDP for real-time IPTV applications. From the viewpoint of the multi-streaming feature, it is shown that the SCTP overcomes the well-known head-of-line (HoL) blocking problems when multiple streams are transported over the SCTP. In addition, the multi-streaming SCTP gives faster channel switching time, compared to the TCP.