23.13 Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the SCTP autoclose facility, exploring how it can be used to limit idle associations in a one-to-many socket. We built a simple utility that an application can use to receive large messages with the partial delivery API. We examined how an application can decode events that occur on the transport with a simple utility that displays notifications. We briefly looked at how a user can send unordered data and bind a subset of addresses. We saw how to acquire the addresses of both the peer end of an association as well as the local end. We also examined a simple method an application can use to translate an address into an association ID.

Heartbeats (termed keep-alives in TCP) are exchanged by default on an SCTP association. We examined how to control this feature through a small utility we built. We looked at how to extract an association with the sctp_peeloff system call, and illustrated an example server that was both iterative and concurrent using this call. We also discussed considerations an application needs to make before tuning the SCTP timing parameters. We concluded with a look at when an application should consider using SCTP.