The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a computer networking communications protocol in the transport layer of the Internet protocol suite. Originally intended for Signaling System 7 (SS7) message transport in telecommunication, the protocol provides the message-oriented feature of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) while ensuring reliable, in-sequence transport of messages with congestion control like the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Unlike UDP and TCP, the protocol supports multihoming and redundant paths to increase resilience and reliability.
SCTP is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFCÂ 9260. The SCTP reference implementation was released as part of FreeBSD version 7 and has since been widely ported to other platforms.