Calls: Send in your ideas. Deadline April 1, 2024
Grant
End: 2011-01

SCTP-Linux

A better Linux SCTP

The Internet transport layer has been extremely rigid since its inception. The very diverse requirements of today’s applications are mapped to only two services, provided by the two protocols that are broadly available, TCP and UDP.

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) offers promising benefits to applications, but faces significant deployment problems. One of these problems is certainly related to shortcomings of its Linux implementation ("LKSCTP"), which cause it to perform much worse than TCP under most circumstances. It is obvious that, for SCTP to be an attractive option for application designers, it should always perform at least as good as TCP.

The two most important TCP features that are not required according to the standard are missing in LKSCTP: auto-buffer tuning and pluggable congestion control. In this project:

  1. Auto-buffer tuning will be added to SCTP.
  2. Work towards adding pluggable congestion control will be carried out.
  3. An investigation of other, less significant differences between TCP and SCTP in Linux will be carried out.
  • The project's own website:

University of Oslo, Norway.