SCTP in Go

This paper describes a successful attempt to combine two relatively new technologies: Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and the programming language Go, achieved by extending the existing Go network library with SCTP. SCTP is a reliable, message-oriented transport layer protocol, similar to TCP and UDP. It offers sequenced delivery of messages over multiple streams, network fault tolerance via multihoming support, resistance against flooding and masquerade attacks and congestion avoidance procedures. It has improvements over wider-established network technologies and is gradually gaining traction in the telecom and Internet industries. Go is an open source, concurrent, statically typed, compiled and garbage-collected language, developed by Google Inc. Go’s main design goals are simplicity and ease of use and it has a syntax broadly similar to C. Go has good support for networked and multicore computing and as a system language is often used for networked applications, however it doesn’t yet support SCTP. By combining SCTP and Go, software engineers can exploit the advantages of both technologies. The implementation of SCTP extending the Go network library was done on FreeBSD and Mac OS X the two operating systems that contain the most up to date implementation of the SCTP specification.