SCTP is in the Tree :-)
Randall Stewart
rrs at cisco.com
Wed Nov 8 20:59:44 UTC 2006
Hi all:
I wanted to point out to y'all that FreeBSD current now
has SCTP.. you enable it with option SCTP in your
config :-)
So, what is SCTP?
Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) - is a reliable message
oriented transport protocol which provides network fault tolerance
It supports multiple streams and multihoming. A very good overview
of the protocol is given in RFC 3268.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3268.txt?number=3268
So, why would you want to use SCTP?
Well, the basic SCTP protocol gives you several features unique for
transporting messages:
- Strong checksum, you won't get corrupt data without knowing it.
- Multi-homing directly supported, this means you can have each
side of your connection (called an association in SCTP) have multiple
IP addresses for redundancy, and SCTP will seamlessly use them.
- Support of IPv4 and IPv6, you can even use both of them at the
same time in a connection.
- Partial ordering and unordered delivery - This feature minimizes the
impact of head-of-line blocking. You basically can send multiple
transactions in parallel on separate "streams" and message loss in
one stream will not block message delivery in another.
The implemented extensions of SCTP provide
- Support authentication and dynamic address addition/deletion (you can
do transport layer mobility with this actually :-D)
- Partial reliability. You can basically do sending with a time to
live before you give up trying to send it. A while ago Marco Molteni
had a paper in EuroBSD on using this with Mpeg and showed how it can
be used.
So, what features does the dropped in code support?
Most of all features described in an IETF document (RFC or ID)
are implemented. It is fairly stable but more testing is needed.
The list of implemented documents is:
* RFC 2960 (base protocol spec)
* RFC 3309 (checksum change)
* RFC 4460 (implementers guide)
* draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctp-2960bis-03.txt (will replace RFC 2960)
* RFC3758 (partial reliability)
* draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctp-auth-05.txt (SCTP level authentication)
* draft-ietf-tsvwg-addip-sctp-15.txt (dynamic address modifications)
* draft-stewart-sctpstrrst-03.txt (stream reset)
* draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctp-padding-02.txt (needed for improved path MTU
discovery)
* draft-ladha-sctp-nonce-05.txt (ECN-Nonce and basic ECN)
* draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctpsocket-13.txt (the socket API for SCTP)
So, who uses SCTP currently?
SCTP was developed for transporting telephony network signaling
messages over IP (SS7/IP). Therefore it is now deployed in
the telephony networks. It makes it easy to connect IP-based
systems to the telephony network, for example to process SMS.
You can also find SCTP used by H.248 and other signalling protocols.
There are experimental patches and deployments around for
apache and firefox. I know the sctp.org web server is reachable
via SCTP. Some SIP implementations also support SCTP for both
proxy's and even end-hosts. The university of vancover is
doing work with MPI and SCTP. And of course IPFIX/netflow which
is for peg-count data collection of what is going on in a
network :-)
So how do you try and use it?
SCTP uses the socket API. Using the advanced functionality of SCTP
requires you to use additonal SCTP specific functions. But for using
the basic functionality, only minor modifications to the current
way you write network programs is required (indicating SCTP
in the socket() call and changing the transport level socket
options). However, if the application does not bind to
specific addresses, it will use multihoming for free.
A very good introduction to SCTP socket programming is provided
in the third edition of "Unix Network Programming" by Steven,
Fenner and Rudoff.
Other places on the web that have information on SCTP:
http://www.sctp.org (the project web site and a general
collection of info... under the
drafts tab is a nice set of tutorials
that were presented at a linux symposium)
http://www.sctp.org/sctpoverview.html (Lyndon Ong's nice
intro/overview of SCTP)
Project plans:
- Debug/debug debug :-)
- Continuted code improvements
- Performance improvements if we can :-)
- Continue to support a multi-platform
stack for MAC-OS X/NetBSD/FreeBSD6.x
and other platforms.
- Add appropriate features (in the future).
R
--
Randall Stewart
NSSTG - Cisco Systems Inc.
803-345-0369 <or> 803-317-4952 (cell
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