Stream Control Transmission Protocol - for beginners

SCTP is a reliable transport protocol operating on top of a potentially unreliable connectionless packet service such as IP. It offers acknowledged error-free non-duplicated transfer of datagrams (messages). Detection of data corruption, loss of data and duplication of data is achieved by using checksums and sequence numbers. A selective retransmission mechanism is applied to correct loss or corruption of data.

http://tdrwww.exp-math.uni-essen.de/inhalt/forschung/sctp_fb/