Is there a UDP-based protocol that offers more robust sending of large data elements without datagram reliability?

2
votes

On one end, you have TCP, which guarantees that packets arrive and that they arrive in order. It's also designed for the commodity Internet, with congestion control algorithms that "play nice" in traffic. On the other end of the spectrum, you have UDP, which doesn't guarantee arrival time and order of packets, and it allows you to send large data to a receiver. Somewhere in the middle, you have reliable UDP-based programs, such as UDT, that offer customized congestion control algorithms and reliability, but with greater speed and flexibility.

However, what I'm looking for is the capability to send large chunks of data over UDP (greater than the 64k datagram size of UDP), but without a concern for reliability of each individual datagram. The idea is that the large data is broken down into datagrams of a specified size (<= 64,000 bytes), probably with some header data stuck on the front and sent over the network. On the receiving side, these datagrams are read in and stored. If a datagram doesn't arrive, all of the datagrams associated with that transfer are simply thrown out by the client.

Most of the "reliable UDP" implementations try to maintain reliability of each datagram, but I'm only interested in the whole, and if I don't get the whole, it doesn't matter - throw it all away and wait for the next. I'd have to dig deeper, but it might be possible with custom congestion control algorithms in UDT. However, are there any protocols with this approach?

1
network-programmingudpnetwork-protocols
So this isn't a robust protocol at all then? – Steve-o
@Steve-o It is more robust (at least from the client's perspective) in that you won't end up with malformed data due to missing or out of order packets - you'll either get everything or nothing, and the client knows that if they receive data, it's complete and ordered. – Thomas Owens

1 Answers

0
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You could try ENet, whilst not specifically aimed at what you're trying to do it does have the concept of 'fragmented data blocks' whereby you send data larger than its MTU and it sends as a sequence of datagrams of its MTU with header details that relate one part of the sequence to the rest. The version I'm using only supports 'reliable' fragments (that is the ENet reliability layer will kick in to resend missing fragments) but I seem to remember seeing discussion on the mailing list about unreliable fragments which would likely to exactly what you want; i.e. deliver the whole payload if it all arrives and throw away the bits if it doesn't.

See http://enet.bespin.org/

Alternatively take a look at the answers to this question: What do you use when you need reliable UDP?