The full form of SCTP is Stream Control Transmission Protocol

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a computer networking communications protocol which operates at the transport layer and serves a role similar to the popular protocols TCP and UDP. It is standardized by IETF in RFC 4960.

SCTP provides some of the features of both UDP and TCP: it is message-oriented like UDP and ensures reliable, in-sequence transport of messages with congestion control like TCP. It differs from those protocols by providing multi-homing and redundant paths to increase resilience and reliability.

In the absence of native SCTP support in operating systems, it is possible to tunnel SCTP over UDP,^[1] as well as to map TCP API calls to SCTP calls so existing applications can use SCTP without modification.^[2] The reference implementation was released as part of FreeBSD version 7. It has since been widely ported.