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* Copyright (c) 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
* DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.
*
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* under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only, as
* published by the Free Software Foundation. Oracle designates this
* particular file as subject to the "Classpath" exception as provided
* by Oracle in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code.
*
* This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
* ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
* version 2 for more details (a copy is included in the LICENSE file that
* accompanied this code).
*
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/**
* A Java API for Stream Control Transport Protocol.
*
* <P> The Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP) is a reliable,
* message-oriented, transport protocol existing at an equivalent level with UDP
* (User Datagram Protocol) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). SCTP is
* session oriented and an association between the endpoints must be established
* before any data can be transmitted.
*
* <P> SCTP has direct support for multi-homing, meaning than an endpoint may be
* represented by more than one address and each address may be used for sending
* and receiving data, thus providing network redundancy. The connection between
* two endpoints is referred to as an association between those endpoints.
* Endpoints can exchange a list of addresses during association setup. One
* address is designated as the primary address, this is the default address that
* the peer will use for sending data. A single port number is used across the
* entire address list at an endpoint for a specific session.
*
* <P> SCTP is message based. I/O operations operate upon messages and message
* boundaries are preserved. Each association may support multiple independant
* logical streams. Each stream represents a sequence of messages within a single
* association and streams are independant of one another, meaning that stream
* identifiers and sequence numbers are included in the data packet to allow
* sequencing of messages on a per-stream basis.
*
* <P> This package provides two programming model styles. The one-to-one style
* supported by {@link com.sun.nio.sctp.SctpChannel} and {@link
* com.sun.nio.sctp.SctpServerChannel}, and the one-to-many
* style supported by {@link com.sun.nio.sctp.SctpMultiChannel}.
* The semantics of the one-to-one style interface are very similar to TCP.
* An {@code SctpChannel} can only control one SCTP association. The
* semantics of the one-to-many style interface are very similar to UDP. An
* {@code SctpMutliChannel} can control multiple SCTP associations.
*
* <P> Applications can send and receive per-message ancillary information through
* {@link com.sun.nio.sctp.MessageInfo}. For example, the stream number that
* the message it is to be sent or received from. The SCTP stack is event driven
* and applications can receive notifications of certain SCTP events by invoking
* the {@code receive} method of the SCTP channel with an appropriate {@link
* com.sun.nio.sctp.NotificationHandler notification handler}.
*
* <P> The SCTP protocol is defined by
* <A HREF="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4960">RFC4960</A>, and the optional
* extension for <I>Dynamic Address Reconfiguration</I> is defined by
* <A HREF="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5061">RFC5061</A>.
*
* @since 1.7
*/
package com.sun.nio.sctp;