outgoing TCP from custom background worker?

Hi,

is it possible to create and process an outgoing TCP connection from
within a custom background worker process?

Something like:

// upon worker startup, enter loop ..
conn = connectTCP("myhost");
while (data = conn.read()) {
    parse(data);
    // do SQL stuff via SPI and using "data", producing "res"
    conn.send(res);
}

Thanks!

Tobias