Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a reliable transport protocol that provides services similar to the services provided by TCP. In addition, SCTP provides network-level fault tolerance. SCTP supports multihoming at either end of an association. The SCTP socket API supports a one-to-one socket style modeled after TCP. The SCTP socket API also supports a one-to-many socket style designed for use with signaling. The one-to-many socket style reduces the number of file descriptors used in a process. You must link the libsctp library to use SCTP function calls.
An SCTP association is set up between two endpoints. The endpoints use a four-way handshake mechanism that uses a cookie to guard against some types of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The endpoints can be represented by multiple IP addresses.