We are currently beginning work on adding SCTP support to APR. This is a brief description of what we plan to do and why, and is meant to be an open invitation for comment from interested members of the APR community.
Over the past few years some interesting work has been done on using HTTP over SCTP, and interest has grown to the point where an Internet Draft is in progress (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-natarajan-http-over-sctp-01). The topic also generated a lot of positive interest at the recent HTTPbis WG meeting in San Francisco. Past work includes hacked versions of Apache's httpd and Mozilla's Firefox browser to demonstrate some potential benefits of HTTP over SCTP. (See for example http://www.cis.udel.edu/~leighton/) Work is nearly complete on a patch to add SCTP support to Mozilla's NSPR library, for all supported platforms. The motivation for the NSPR work is primarily to support adding HTTP over SCTP capability to Firefox. Our interest in APR is similar in that ultimately we want to pursue adding HTTP over SCTP capability to httpd. As has been done with NSPR, we plan to add two functions to the APR API (e.g. apr_sctp_sendmsg()) to send/recv data on a specific SCTP stream, and to add several SCTP socket options to set/get stream and association related information. The apr_sctp_sendmsg()/recvmsg() API is necessary to take advantage of SCTP's features. We expect to post a patch for review once we have a working version. SCTP is available on linux, *BSD, Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC), Solaris and Open Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX, and possibly other platforms as well. Jon Leighton University of Delaware Preethi Natarajan Cisco Systems
