Performance analysis and improvement of PR-SCTP for small messages

PR-SCTP, a partially reliable extension of SCTP, provides a flexible QoS trade-off between timeliness and reliability for application traffic. However, the performance of PR-SCTP can be affected by certain traffic characteristics and network scenarios. We previously proposed an NR-SACK based optimization for PR-SCTP. In this work, we extensively evaluate and analyze the performance of PR-SCTP with NR-SACKs using different network scenarios. Moreover, we compare the performance of our NR-SACK based PR-SCTP with existing transport protocols for syslog traffic. In the evaluation, we use real syslog traces from an operational syslog system. The results indicate that NR-SACK based PR-SCTP significantly improves the overall message transfer delay as compared to SCTP and TCP.