Considerations of SCTP Retransmission Delays for Thin Streams

The popularity of distributed interactive applications has exploded in the last few years. For example, massive multi-player online games have become a fast growing, multi-million industry with a very high user mass supporting hundreds or thousands of concurrent players. Today, such games are usually client-server applications that use TCP for time-dependent communication. Similar multimedia applications also choose TCP frequently. Very thin data streams are sent over each of these TCP connections, which means that they consume very little bandwidth. TCP has several shortcomings with respect to the latency requirements of such thin streams because of its retransmission handling [7]. An alternative to TCP may be SCTP [13] which was developed to answer the requirements for signaling transport. SCTP has subsequently also been considered more appropriate than TCP for congestion controlled streaming of other time-dependent data. Important reasons are its maintenance of packet boundaries an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: LCN
• Authors: Jon Pedersen, Carsten Griwodz, Pål Halvorsen
• Keywords: Data Streams, LCN 2006, SCTP, TCP Connections