Stream Control Transmission Protocol

SCTP protocols is  transport layer protocol that is same as TCP or UDp, but supports the service features of both:
1.)message-oriented like UDP and
2.)in-sequence transport of messages with congestion control like TCP.


Features

Features of SCTP include:

    Multihoming support in which one or both endpoints of a connection can consist of more than one IP address, enabling transparent fail-over between redundant network paths.
    Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminate unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.
    Path selection and monitoring select a primary data transmission path and test the connectivity of the transmission path.
    Validation and acknowledgment mechanisms protect against flooding attacks and provide notification of duplicated or missing data chunks.
    Improved error detection suitable for Ethernet jumbo frames.

The designers of SCTP originally intended it for the transport of telephony (Signaling System 7) over Internet Protocol, with the goal of duplicating some of the reliability attributes of the SS7 signaling network in IP. This IETF effort is known as SIGTRAN. In the meantime, other uses have been proposed, for example, the Diameter protocol and Reliable server pooling (RSerPool).