This master’s thesis has been completed at TietoEnator R&D Services in Karlstad, during 2004. The main goal of the thesis is to investigate how network processor technology can be used in today’s telecom network for signaling services to achieve higher performance. Today, network processors are used in modern telecom systems, such as the 3G mobile telephone system, for low layer processing, usually the IP and ATM protocols. This thesis will investigate how the complex architecture of the network processors can be utilized for more advanced protocol at higher protocol layers. The most important protocol in this thesis is the Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP). SCTP is a transport layer protocol that is used for signaling transport. A prototype of SCTP has been implemented in an Intel IXP 2400 network processor to investigate how suitable a network processor is for transport layer protocol implementation, as well as performance gain achieved with the network processor architecture. The main purpose of this thesis is to implement a SCTP data fast-path prototype on an Intel IXP 2400 network processor and evaluate this prototype. However, other network processor families are included in a brief survey and compared to the Intel IXP. The network processors architectures are compared. Differences in how they are programmed have also been investigated. The thesis also includes an overview of other protocols used in signaling. This overview is provided to give the reader a background to the work, and to present possible other protocols, that may be suitable for network processor implementation to draw advantage of their specialized architecture. The implementation done shows that SCTP is suitable to implement in a network processor. The performance of the transport layer implementation indicated that data rates at Gbit/s are possible.