Coexistence of SCTP and TCP variants under self-similar network

SCTP will co-exist with TCP on the Internet in a near future as its maturity progresses. Self-similarity is long known as an inherent characteristic of the IP network in which performance of SCTP under such environment is yet to be investigated. This paper reports behaviors and throughput of SCTP and TCP streams when co-existed together in the same channel under self-similar traffic environment. Simulation tests on several TCP variants including New-Reno, Reno, Tahoe, Vegas, and SACK using ns2 simulator are conducted. Results reveal that SCTP acquires averagely only 50% throughput when competing with TCP. Although found that self-similarity does not extensively distort SCTP-TCP performance, it, nevertheless, offers indirect advantage to SCTP in gaining throughput proportion against TCP.