Nice alternative for distributed Erlang

[Per Bergqvist]

Hi all,

Attended to a signaling conference last week.
Apart from all the U.S. vendors of VoIP solution trying to explain how
simple telephony
really is, yawn, there were a few nice parts as well.
The IETF Signaling Transport group, SIGTRAN, are proposing a new
protocol
called Stream Control Transmission Protocol, SCTP.
It is primarily intended for carrying various SS7 protocol over IP but
the problems
SCTP address are common to most IP based applications with very high
reliability
requirements.

Excerpt from the draft abstract:

> SCTP is a reliable datagram transfer protocol operating on top of an
> unreliable routed packet network such as IP. It offers the following
> services to its users:
>
>   -- acknowledged error-free non-duplicated transfer of user data,
>   -- data segmentation to conform to discovered path MTU size,
>   -- sequenced delivery of user messages within multiple streams,
>      with an option for order-of-arrival delivery of individual
>      user messages,
>   -- optional multiplexing of user messages into SCTP datagrams, and
>   -- network-level fault tolerance through supporting of multi-homing
>     at either or both ends of an association.
>
> The design of SCTP includes appropriate congestion avoidance behavior
> and resistance to flooding and masquerade attacks.

There was a SCTP bake-off hosted by Siemens in Munich two weeks ago.
Twelve companies interop tested their implementations, Ericsson was
one of theme.
The results were reported to exceed expectation and according to the
several speakers on the subject no show-stoppers have been identified
so far.

While still only a draft I think SCTP looks very promising and it might
be
just what distributed Erlang needs to really provide high availability
services.

While at it, some attention should also be put on node naming to get rid

of all the weird shit happening when trying to use Erlang in a
multihomed
environment.

Comments anyone ?

/Per

Per Bergqvist
Director WAP Innovation & Development
CellPoint Systems AB