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Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What, exactly, is SCTP?

    2. See SCTP Overview.

  2. What are the benefits of SCTP compare to other IP transport protocols?

    3. SCTP essentially combines the following features, which are in either TCP or UDP, into a single protocol:
    • Reliable data transfer 
    • Congestion control 
    • Message boundary conservation 
    • Path MTU discovery and message fragmentation 
    • Ordered and unordered data delivery 
    The following new capabilities are also built into the SCTP protocol:
    • Multi-streaming - This feature provides a user-controlled multiple stream data transfer mechanism within a single association between two endpoints. It is designed to solve the head-of-the-line blocking problem of TCP; but more importantly, it provides users the capability of delivering multiple independent data flows, either ordered or unordered, between two endpoints without the overhead of invoking multiple connections.
    • Multi-homing - This feature allows a single SCTP association to run across multiple links or paths. With the built-in heartbeat and the failover capability, it provides transparent link/path redundancy to applications. Moreover, being in the transport layer protocol, SCTP Multi-homing does not polute the core routing tables the way today's most popular multi-homing solutions do.
    • Security and authentication

      • - The protocol is designed with a security cookie mechanism to prevent the SYN-flood attacks known for TCP. It also has checksum and tagging information in the protocol headers to ensure the data integrity and to provide protection against potential security offenders.


  3. How do I build and test the lksctp implementation?

    4. See INSTALL notes. 

  4. How do I know that lksctp is installed and running on my system? 

    5. There are test programs provided for you to verify your installation with. Refer to the section on testing tools for instructions.

  5. How do I port or write applications to run on top of lksctp?

    6. lksctp provides the SCTP socket-based API based on the IETF Internet-draft Sockets API Extensions for SCTP. The primary goal of this API design is to provide the consistencies and the flexibilities for developers to either port or develop sockets based applications to take advantage of the SCTP features. By using this API, applications can be written in two networking programming styles: either in the connection-oriented style (TCP-style) or in the connectionless style (UDP-style). For more information on the features and functions currently supported by lksctp, please refer to the summary of the features and functions.

  6. Can I have some example applications which show how to use lksctp?

    7. The lksctp source contains a set of test programs which would also serve as example applications. Please refer to testing tools for details.

  7. I am a developer, and I would like to contribute to the lksctp project. How do I start?

    8. The lksctp project is always looking for community members interested in contributing. Please refer to the developer's notes section for more information on working with the lksctp.