- Is a reliable protocol that combines the good features of UDP and TCP
- Provides additional services not provided by UDP or TCP, such as multiple-stream and multihoming services
- Is a connection-oriented protocol, in which connection is called an association
- Provides flow control, error control, and congestion control
- To distinguish between streams it uses Sequence Identifier (SI)
- To distinguish between different data chunks belonging to the same stream, it uses the Stream Sequence Number (SSN)