Performance analysis of TCP and SCTP over Satellite Networks due to Effect of Congestion Control

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new transport layer protocol which can be deployed in the Internet along with TCP. In this paper, we investigate the performance issues that arise when SCTP and TCP are used in the same satellite network. We evaluate performance through measurement of throughput, and also fairness of use of networks resources by the two protocols. We observed that SCTP is fair, although SCTP always achieved slightly higher throughput than TCP. We have analyzed the results to show that differences in the congestion control mechanism of TCP and SCTP are responsible for the higher throughput attained by SCTP.