Identifying Packet Loss and Reordering Packets in Keyed UDP Transmissions
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The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and other similar protocols send the application data from the source machine to the destination machine inside segments, without foreseeing nor allowing for any type of control on the transmission or success metrics. These protocols are very convenient for e.g. real time data transmission. But when the reliability of the transmitted data is critical, other protocols termed as connection-oriented, allow for full control of the data transmission process, assuring that the received data is an exact copy of the transmitted data, e.g. the case of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). To sustain the increased functionality and features of the connection-oriented protocol, a set of mechanisms is implemented based on some specific fields of the segment header. These mechanisms result in a significant overhead in terms of the increased number of transmitted packets. This may further translate into significant delays, because of the additional number of switching and routing tasks, and eventually, because of more complex communications procedures, such as e.g. transmission window resizing, and of course, acknowledgement and sequence numbers updating. The two extremes of these communication modalities, one that has no control at all, and the other one that allows for full control, have resulted in the creation of an intermediate protocol that allows for a limited degree of knowledge on how successful a transmission was, and even for an eventual reordering of the segments that arrive out of sequence. This paper presents simulation results that confirm the efficiency of the new almost-reliable UDP protocol, termed Keyed User Datagram Protocol (or KUDP) for transmission of data that includes the ability to identify which packets were lost and to reorder packets that were received out-of-sequence, and points future tasks to be pursued in this research.
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