VOL. 13, NO. 9, MAY 2018 ISSN 1819-6608 ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences ©2006-2018 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN). All rights reserved. www.arpnjournals.com 3087 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF TCP, UDP, AND SCTP IN MANETS G. N. Vivekananda and P. Chenna Reddy Department of Computer Science Engineering, JNTUA, Ananthapuramu, Andhra Pradesh, India E-Mail: vivekanandagn@gmail.com ABSTRACT The number of applications that are using ad-hoc interface is increasing continuously. This effect on diverse quality requirements such as delay, bandwidth, jitter, and reliability. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) allows two hosts to establish a connection and switch streams of data. User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a connectionless protocol that is used mainly for low-latency applications. In-Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) we can transmit several data streams between two endpoints when a network connection established at the same time. Due to the various constraints such as mobility, flexibility, and reliability, TCP and UDP don't perform well in ad hoc networks. This paper gives the performance evaluation of TCP, UDP, and SCTP regarding various quality metrics using ns2. Simulation results prove that SCTP performs better than TCP and UDP regarding throughput, jitter, loss rate, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay in ad hoc networks. Keywords: MANETs, multi-streaming, performance, SCTP, TCP, UDP. 1. INTRODUCTION Nowadays interactive applications are among the most popular services in the Information and Communication Technologies world. The main reasons for this are, increase in various devices that support different data applications. In recent years, there is also increase in some users from professional to personal. Increase in the processing speed, capabilities of devices, and the global applications of mobile networks designed for data communications results in high data rate services. These make data transmission as a potential area to work. TCP acts as a byte-oriented protocol as its acknowledgment and flow control depends on the byte number rather than packet number. Each packet or segment is identified by a data octet number, although data communicated over the internet are in small or large parts. UDP cannot ensure ordered data transmission and reliability in the TCP fashion. This may be because of many issues like out of order arrival of the datagram’s, or data duplications, or may be misplaced or lost without notification. The main reason that makes UDP more efficient and faster is avoiding the checking overhead from every packet arrival. UDP performs well in the scenarios in which confident delivery is not essential. Applications that are time sensitive frequently uses UDP, as dropped packets are considered equivalent to delayed packets. UDP Connectionless nature also benefits servers that respond minor requests from a massive number of clients also. Unlike TCP, UDP provisions packet broadcasting. In SCTP message transmissions carrier in the form of a stream instead of individual data packets and hence, considered as a single operation (J. Rosenberg et al., 2005). Similarly, the reception of the exact message also viewed as a single transaction. Multi-homing and Multi- streaming are the two unique features of SCTP that deliver reliable data simultaneously (Vivekananda, G. N et al., 2017). Reliability and content delivery can categorize possible ways of data transfer. The reliability category differentiates between transmission with full reliability, no reliability, and partial reliability. Reliability can be achieved through missing or misplaced data retransmissions, which may further lead to delays in transmissions. For partial reliability, retransmissions are attempted in a limited number, thereby regulating the delaying of remaining streams and not transmitting outdated data. Four possible categories of data deliveries are reliable, unreliable, ordered, and unordered that are possibly used by SCTP mechanisms (R.Fracchia et al., 2005). The objective of this paper is to ascertain that SCTP performs better regarding the delay, throughput, controlled packet loss and an increase in packet delivery ratio maintaining reliability in ad hoc networks when compared to UDP and TCP in data transmissions. Overhead comparison of protocols Transport Protocol Data Unit (PDU) headers- TCP-PDU consists of 20 bytes of a length of the header without options, and UDP-PDU header has 8 bytes of header whereas SCTP-PDU consumes 12 bytes length of standard header along with its headers. For example, if data header chunk of SCTP has 16 bytes, then SCTP-PDU can carry a single data chunk, i.e.,28 bytes which will be the total header size, which is 40% greater than the TCP- PDU header without using the options. In Message-based vs. Byte-based transmission, Chunk acts as basic transmission units in SCTP. SCTP sender covers every Application-PDU (A-PDU) in a single chunk. A-PDU is delivered similarly from the SCTP receiver as it is received. SCTP boundaries preserve message during transmission and delivery (R.Stewartet al., 2004). Similar to UDP, the sender sends a message in only one operation in SCTP, and the receiving application receives the exact message that is processed in one operation. In contrast to this mechanism, byte-based transmission is followed by TCP. TCP sender does not maintain message A-PDU boundaries. For instance, we can add the end portion of one A-PDU with the beginning part of another A-PDU as the bytes fit into one single TCP-segment during transmission. Similarly, a TCP