A comparison between two maintenance session protocols

The paper presents a comparison between two maintenance session protocols. The first one, already known and used, is the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP). The second is a new one, called managed session protocol (MSP). SCTP has some similar functionalities to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and, as additional services, it provides multi-streaming and multi-homing. On the other hand, MSP is a novel maintenance session protocol that operates on top of TCP. Rather than re-implementing some TCP functionalities, MSP enhances the TCP layer with some missing services, such as automatic transport restart and preservation of messages boundaries. Besides, MSP is implemented in user space instead of having to handle all kernel complexities. In order to provide services like multi-session and broadcasting, a sub-protocol is provided, called multiple managed session protocol (MMSP). MMSP operates on top of MSP and offers services such as multi-homing, multi-streaming and multi-session. It is shown that MSP/MMSP is a good alternative to SCTP.