Policy-Based IP Address Selection in SCTP Automatic Address Reconfiguration

SCTP is a reliable transport protocol that supports redundant paths by multiaddressing. Dynamic reconfiguration of IP addresses of an existing association is also supported by an extension called the ADD-IP feature. SCTP tries to use of all available addresses on both end hosts, but among them, there are addresses that should preferably not be used by certain policies or that are known to be unusable beforehand. Trials to use such addresses might cause unexpected degradations of performance or undesired termination of associations by time out. In this study, we propose a new feature by which a user can specify his own address usage policy, per process, according to which a host can determine which address may be used and which should be ignored. If an application program with SCTP is written in the protocol independent programming style, improper addresses are transparently removed so that the application program might use all and only usable addresses.