
72 ◾ IP Communications and Services for NGN
has embraced SCTP as a general-purpose transport layer protocol above the IP layer
of the Internet protocol stack. It is designed to expand the scope beyond TCP and
UDP. An SCTP connection, called an association, provides novel services such as
multi-homing, which allows the end points of a single association to have multiple IP
addresses, and multi-streaming, which allows for independent delivery among data
streams. Figure 3.1 shows the position of SCTP in the Internet protocol stack, and
also illustrates an SCTP association using multi-homing and multi-streaming. e
main interesting features of ...