Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) Associations

For the one-to-one socket we discussed in the first article in this series, there can be only one association at any time. For the one-to-many sockets we will cover in the next article, there can be many associations active at any one time—a peer can be connected to many other peers simultaneously. This is different from TCP where only one connection on a socket can exist and also is different from UDP where no connections exist and messages are just sent to arbitrary peers.

When there can be many associations, you need to be able to distinguish between them. This is done by an opaque data type called an association ID. You need to use this sometimes, but not every time. For one-to-one sockets, there is only one association, so the association ID is always ignored. For one-to-many sockets, when the association is “obvious”, the association ID again is ignored. This occurs, for example, when you write to a peer and give the peer's socket address; there can be only one association to a peer (but many associations to many peers), so if the peer is known, the association is known, and there is no need for the ID. But the association ID has to be used when the SCTP stack cannot work out for itself which association is meant. One place where this happens is in the getsockopt() call described previously to find the number of streams of an association on a one-to-many socket. I will defer the discussion of how to find the association ID to the next article, where I look at one-to-many sockets.

There are several ways of writing to a stream and telling to which stream a read belongs. Some of them make use of a structure of type sctp_sndrcvinfo:

struct sctp_sndrcvinfo { 
      uint16_t sinfo_stream; 
      uint16_t sinfo_ssn; 
      uint16_t sinfo_flags; 
      uint32_t sinfo_ppid; 
      uint32_t sinfo_context; 
      uint32_t sinfo_timetolive; 
      uint32_t sinfo_tsn; 
      uint32_t sinfo_cumtsn; 
      sctp_assoc_t sinfo_assoc_id; 
}

Most of the fields in this structure are not of interest to us at the moment. The interesting one is the first one, sinfo_stream. To write to a particular stream, zero out all fields and set this one; to read, zero out all fields again, do the read, and then examine this field. (As an aside, if the SCTP stack cannot work out which association is meant, the last field, sinfo_assoc_id, must be set.)

The function call to write a message is:

int sctp_send(int sd, 
              const void *msg, 
              size_t len, 
              const struct sctp_sndrcvinfo *sinfo, 
              int flags);