Branched-off Association

Applications can branch an established association on a one-to-many style socket into a separate socket and file descriptor. A separate socket and file descriptor is useful for applications that have a number of sporadic message senders or receivers that need to remain under the original one-to-many style socket. The application branches off associations that carry high volume data traffic into separate socket descriptors. The application uses the sctp_peeloff() call to branch off an association into a separate socket. The new socket is a one-to-one style socket. The syntax for the sctp_peeloff() function is as follows:

sock

The original one-to-many style socket descriptor returned from the socket() system call

id

The identifier of the association to branch off to a separate file descriptor

The sctp_peeloff() function fails and returns EOPTNOTSUPP if the socket descriptor passed in the sock parameter is not a one-to-many style SCTP socket. The sctp_peeloff() function fails and returns EINVAL if the value of id is zero or if the value of id is greater than the maximum number of associations for the socket descriptor passed in the sock parameter. The sctp_peeloff() function fails and returns EMFILE if the function fails to create a new user file descriptor or file structure.