Suitability of SCTP for high quality video streaming over CDMA2000

This paper investigates the performance of the transport layer stream control transfer protocol (SCTP) for streaming video over CDMA2000 cellphone and data wireless networks. The main measure of performance was quality of the received video at a given buffer size, as cellphones have memory of limited capacity. The hypothesis was that SCTP would be able to improve the quality of streamed video over UDP under the same memory requirements. The study involved a series of simulation experiments and measurements in a testbed on the Telecom NZ CDMA2000 network, to test the performance of video streaming under SCTP and under UDP. It was found that SCTP did not improve the quality in streamed video with up to 5 second buffers. While it was known that in case of high packet loss or congestion SCTP could improve the quality, the CDMA2000 network does not suffer from the impairments that SCTP could neutralise, and because of that, in this scenario, the quality of video streaming under SCTP and UDP are similar. The added complexity of SCTP also makes it less suitable for embedded systems.