This counts total SCTP packets received from peers at the packet level, as opposed to chunk-level counters like cSctpStatRecCtrlChunks, giving the coarsest-grained inbound traffic measure for the SCTP layer on this device. It's the number to use for a simple 'is this device seeing SCTP traffic at all' sanity check before digging into the more granular per-chunk-type or per-association counters. Since cSctpStatSentSCTPPacks carries an identical description in this MIB, cross-check both against real traffic to confirm which one actually represents outbound packets on your device before relying on it for reporting.