@article {Simula.ND.311,
	title = {Improving SCTP Retransmission Delays for Time-Dependent Thin Streams},
	journal = {Multimedia Tools and Applications},
	volume = {45},
	number = {1-3},
	year = {2009},
	note = {Special Issue on Massively Multiuser Online Gaming Systems and Applications},
	pages = {33-60},
	abstract = {A large number of network services rely on IP and reliable transport pro- tocols. For applications that provide abundant data for transmission, loss is usually handled satisfactorily, even if the application is latency-sensitive. For data streams where small packets are sent intermittently, however, applications can occasionally experience extreme latencies. As it is not uncommon that such thin-stream ap- plications are time-dependent, any unnecessarily induced delay can have severe conse- quences for the service provided. It has been shown that TCP has several shortcomings with respect to the latency requirements of thin streams because of the way it handles retransmissions. As such, an alternative to TCP may be SCTP, which was de- veloped to meet the requirements of signalling transport. SCTP has subsequently been considered more appropriate than TCP for congestion-controlled streaming, primarily because SCTP maintains packetboundaries and intrinsically supports partial reliabil- ity. In this paper, we evaluate the Linux-kernel SCTP implementation in the context of thin streams. To address the identi{fi}ed latency challenges, we propose sender-side only enhancements that reduce the application-layer latency in a manner that is compatible with unmodi{fi}ed receivers. These enhancements can be switched on by applications and are used only when the system identi{fi}es the stream as thin. To evaluate the latency performance, we have performed several tests over various real networks and over an emulated network, varying parameters like RTT, packet loss and amount of competing cross tra{ffi}c. When comparing our modi{fi}cations with SCTP on Linux and FreeBSD and TCP New Reno, our results show great latency improvements and indicate the need for a separate handling of thin and thick streams.},
	doi = {10.1007/s11042-009-0286-8},
	author = {Petlund, Andreas and Beskow, Paul and Pedersen, Jon and Espen S{\o}g{\r a}rd {Paaby} and Griwodz, Carsten and Halvorsen, P{\r a}l}
}
@inproceedings {Pedersen.2006.1,
	title = {Considerations for SCTP Retransmission Delays for Thin Streams},
	journal = {Local Computer Networks (LCN 2006)},
	year = {2006},
	note = {(best paper award)},
	month = {Nov},
	pages = {135 - 142},
	publisher = {IEEE},
	type = {Annual},
	abstract = {The popularity of distributed interactive applications has exploded in the last few years. For example, massive multi-player online games have become a fast growing, multi-million industry with a very high user mass supporting hundreds or thousands of concurrent players. Today, such games are usually client-server applications that use TCP for time-dependent communication. Similar multimedia applications also choose TCP frequently. Very thin data streams are sent over each of these TCP connections, which means that they consume very little bandwidth. TCP has several shortcomings with respect to the latency requirements of such thin streams because of its retransmission handling. An alternative to TCP may be SCTP which was developed to answer the requirements for signaling transport. SCTP has subsequently also been considered more appropriate than TCP for congestion controlled streaming of other time-dependent data. Important reasons are its maintenance of packet boundaries and partial reliability. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the Linux SCTP implementation for thin streams. Like others before, we identify latency challenges. We also propose some enhancements for reducing the latency compared to the original Linux implementation. We argue for separate handling of thin and thick data streams in SCTP.},
	isbn = {1-4244-0419-3},
	author = {Pedersen, Jon and Griwodz, Carsten and Halvorsen, P{\r a}l},
	editor = {Christensen, Ken and Frank, Matthias}
}
