Computers & Hardware > Networking

HTTP over SCTP

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Weaver:
I found this really interesting document today:
    https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-natarajan-http-over-sctp-00

Weaver:
I wish the big browser makers would implement this, but only for IPv6 and non-NAT IPv4, because of the problems that crappy NAT translators cause for SCTP.

Aside from the performance improvement to be had in certain cases, I would really like the multihomed-ness support that can be set up with TCP, so that a device with both a wireless LAN connection and a 4G connection simultaneously available could switch from one service to another seamlessly without the breakage that happens with TCP when a client decide changes its own IP when it moves from one network to another.

I could use this to make the 3G/4G failover feature of my Firebrick FB2700 work properly, i.e. seamlessly, but only if Andrews and Arnold get IPv6 going over 3G/4G.

Weaver:
I have an idea that might or might not help improve performance and reduce load on the web servers. Web servers that support SCTP could publish a special flag object saying so in the DNS. This could have a really long lifetime, and be cached at several levels. The first time a client wishes to create an HTTP-over-SCTP connection it consults the DNS to see whether SCTP is available for that particular web server rather than using the twin parallel connect request suggested in the server. This avoids the extra load on all servers of getting and rejecting connect requests when they've never heard of SCTP, but then there's also the time delay for the client associated with the SCTP-support-query DNS lookup. One option might be to speculatively do DNS lookups for every (unique) domain name mentioned in the links in a web page, as a kind of prefetch. Of course, a web client should cache the information obtained about the availability of SCTP, but using the DNS in this way gets you the benefits of the caching available in the OS, and caching which is provided by a lot of routers/gateways and elsewhere in DNS relays as well.

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