Why SCTP use is very restricted despite so many advantages over TCP?

Question

Out of three prominent advance transport protocols (TCP, UDP and SCTP) which is the best to use and why should i use that protocol ?

Answer 1

The primary reason is that SCTP came after TCP had already established itself as the common connection-oriented protocol on top of IP. TCP had already taken hold and it is too embedded now to be dethroned. Also, SCTP has not been promoted enough and not enough developers are aware of its benefits or how to use it properly.

There is the problem that to add SCTP requires upgrading IP stacks and applications. Any application that is written today to use TCP will need to be modified to work with SCTP. Rewriting the world's applications is not practical. There are few server applications that support SCTP so there are few client applications support SCTP.

Answer 2

I think it is also because TCP works :) At least in Diameter implementations, there is application level redundancy (e.g.,, multiple PCRFs). So some of the advantages offered by SCTP (like multihoming) are not that useful.

The added complexity of SCTP implementation (say, selecting the stream) does not provide enough bang for the extra work.