Performance evaluation of SCTP over E-GPRS air interface for HTTP traffic

SCTP has been originally designed to transport PSTN signaling messages over IP networks. It does not suffer from the head of line blocking issue inherent to TCP due to its multi streaming functionality. This work investigates the influence of the multi streaming when used to transport web pages in HTTP 1.0 transaction over SCTP. This solution is compared to the more classical case of HTTP 1.0 over TCP. Simulations results are obtained for a EGPRS air interface, for different cell loads and for a non congested network. Loss of data is only due to transmission errors. The results show that SCTP performs better than TCP when serveral streams are activated at SCTP level and that the multi streaming feature is not unfair for TCP.