TCP vs Reliable UDP

Question

I am writing an application where the client side will be uploading data to the server through a wireless link.

The connection should be very reliable.The link is expected to break many times and there will be many clients connected to the server.

I am confused whether to use TCP or reliable UDP.

Please share your thoughts.

Thanks.

Answer 1

RUDP is not, of course, a formal standard, and there's no telling if you will find existing implementations you can use. Given a choice between rolling this from scratch and just re-making TCP connections, I'd chose TCP.

Answer 2

To be safe, I would go with TCP just because it's a reliable, standard protocol. RUDP has the disadvantage of not being an established standard (although it's been mentioned in several IETF discussions).

Good luck with your project!

Answer 3

It's likely that both your TCP and RUDP links would be broken by your environment, so the fact that you're using RUDP is unlikely to help there; there will likely be times when no datagrams can get through...

What you actually need to make sure of is that a) you can handle the number of connected clients, b) your application protocol can detect reasonably quickly when you've lost connectivity with a client (or server) and c) you can handle the required reconnection and maintenance of cross connection session state for clients.

As long as you deal with b) and c) it doesn't really matter if the connection keeps being broken. Make sure you design your application protocol so that you can get things done in short batches; so if you're uploading files, make sure that you're sending small blocks and that the application protocol can resume a transfer that was broken half way through; you don't want to get 99% of the way through a 2gb transfer and lose the connection and have to start again.

For this to work your server needs some kind of client session state cache where you can keep the logical state of a client's connection beyond the life of the connection itself. Design from the start to expect a given session to include multiple separate connections. The session state should possibly have some kind of timeout so if the client goes away for along time it doesn't continue to consume resources on the server but, to be honest, it may simply be a case of saving the state off to disk after a while.

In summary, I don't think the choice of transport matters and I'd go with TCP at least to start with. What will really matter is being able to manage your client's session state on the server and deal with the fact that clients will connect and disconnect regularly.

Answer 4

If you aren't sure, odds are that you should use TCP. For one thing, it's certain to be part of the network stack for anything supporting IP. "Reliable UDP" is rarely supported out of the box, so you'll have some extra support work for your clients.