SCTP is a message oriented, reliable transport protocol with direct support for multihoming that runs on top of IP or UDP, and supports both v4 and v6 versions.

Like TCP, SCTP provides reliable, connection oriented data delivery with congestion control. Unlike TCP, SCTP also provides message boundary preservation, ordered and unordered message delivery, multi-streaming and multi-homing. Detection of data corruption, loss of data and duplication of data is achieved by using checksums and sequence numbers. A selective retransmission mechanism is applied to correct loss or corruption of data.