Message transfer time analysis during SCTP failover

The basic service offered by SCTP is the reliable transfer of user messages between SCTP users. One of the most important characteristics of SCTP is multihoming. It provides system redundancy. SIGTRAN (Signaling Transport) is the name for a family of protocols used to transfer SS7 (Signaling System 7) signaling messages over the Internet. This family consists of: standard IP, common signaling transport protocol SCTP and adaptive protocol that allows work with other protocols. Signalling messages are susceptible to losses and delay, so one of the most important requests that has to be respected is the transmission paths downtime convergence speed. In this paper it has been analysed whether the SCTP parameter values of SIGTRAN network, which are optimal as far as failover time is concerned, conform to signalling message transfer time requirements.