The drive to exploit the values of the Internet protocol (IP) suite in the traditional
telecom network spawned the creation of the
SIGTRAN workgroup within the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF is the body responsible for
developing the open specifications that define the Internet suite of applications
and protocols. SIGTRAN found its IETF home in the Transport Area sub-working group.
The creators of specification realized and accepted the unique needs of telephony
signaling and understood that a new protocol was required to meet the demands of
determinism, reliability and timeliness that were a key characteristic of the SS7
signaling network.
The IP family, prior to the creation of SIGTRAN, consisted of two transport protocols,
UDP and TCP. UDP was a datagram service that offered best effort transport. It had
no built in mechanism to guarantee delivery, sequencing or receipt of packets. TCP
on the other hand, provided those characteristics but was not deterministic. Timeliness
of arrival and the ability to address head of line blocking were not characteristics
it tried to address.
Signalware and SCTP
Signalware® SCTP is a Unix based streams implementation, existing
within the operating system kernel. Because it is within the OS, it does not suffer
from context switching overhead that occurs with software executing in the user
space. This provides high capacity throughput and robust implementation. Signalware
SCTP provides the deterministic qualities of an embedded real-time system but with
all the flexibility of a standard, general computing platform UNIX system such as
Solaris or Linux. Signalware
portability ensures that applications can easily be migrated across operating
environments within the Signalware family.
Signalware SCTP supports usage of the high availability attributes that are the
flagship qualities of the platform. SCTP is a key component of the other Signalware
SIGTRAN offerings such as M2PA,
M3UA,
SUA, and Signalware SIP.
Feature Summary
- RFC 2960 compliance
- RFC 3309 compliance
- Head of line block prevention
- Delivery of data chunks within independent streams
- Support of multiple IP addresses
- High availability API access
- Path selection and continuity monitoring
- Flood attack prevention
- Multihomed endpoint support
- Reliable, connection oriented
- Message unit based
- User data message delivery within independent streams
- Security mechanisms
- Signalware can be configured to use the native OS SCTP as an alternative to Signalware's
SCTP
For more information, please contact sales@ulticom.com