Fault tolerance associations for IP transport protocols

摘要

The present disclosure addresses a system and method for failure tolerant communications using a transmission control protocol, preferably SCTP. In a preferred embodiment, an association is created between two instances of SCTP, where each instance is an endpoint. While an SCTP association provides for multiple IP addresses providing for multiple paths between the instances, it expressly does not provide for failover of the node occupied by the instance itself. The preferred embodiment provides a duplicate instance of SCTP on a separate node in the cluster which provides a hot back-up to the primary instance. The duplicate instance is maintained by replicating the state information for the association to keep the duplicate instance relatively synchronized with the primary instance.