SCTP Programmer's Guide

Table of Contents
About This Document...................................................................................................................13
Intended Audience.............................................................................................................13
Document Organization.....................................................................................................13
Typographical Conventions................................................................................................13
Related Information............................................................................................................14
HP Encourages Your Comments........................................................................................15
1 Introduction..............................................................................................................................17
SCTP Overview...................................................................................................................17
Limitations of TCP and UDP..............................................................................................18
Limitations of TCP........................................................................................................18
Limitations of UDP........................................................................................................19
SCTP Architecture..............................................................................................................19
SCTP in the IP Stack......................................................................................................20
Connection Setup in SCTP............................................................................................21
SCTP Packet...................................................................................................................23
Congestion Control in SCTP.........................................................................................26
Slow Start and Congestion Avoidance Algorithms.................................................26
Fast Retransmit and Fast Recovery..........................................................................27
SCTP Features.....................................................................................................................27
Multihoming..................................................................................................................28
Multistreaming..............................................................................................................30
Conservation of Data Boundaries.................................................................................31
SCTP Graceful Shutdown Feature................................................................................31
SCTP Support for IPv4 and IPv6 Addresses.................................................................32
SCTP Data Exchange Features......................................................................................32
Support for Dynamic Address Reconfiguration ..........................................................33
Reporting Packet Drops to an Endpoint.......................................................................33
Support for ECN-Nonces in SCTP................................................................................34
SCTP Support for Partially Reliable Data Transmission...............................................35
Error Handling in SCTP.....................................................................................................37
Retransmission of DATA Chunks.................................................................................37
HEARTBEATs to Identify Path Failures........................................................................38
HEARTBEATs to Identify Endpoint Failure.................................................................38
SCTP Security.....................................................................................................................38
Cookie Mechanism........................................................................................................38
Verification Tag..............................................................................................................39
2 SCTP Socket APIs......................................................................................................................41
Table of Contents 3