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 * Copyright (c) 2009, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

 * DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.

 *

 * This code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it

 * 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).

 *

 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License version

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 *

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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 independent

 * logical streams. Each stream represents a sequence of messages within a single

 * association and streams are independent 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;