Rolling a Transport Protocol

How to write a network transport? Well, in this case the definition of the protocol and hence most of the hard work has already been done.

Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) is a reliable multicast transport protocol, guaranteeing that recipients either receive data or detect that it is unrecoverable. TCP is an example of a reliable transport, however TCP is a point to point data stream between two parties. In order to send data to multiple parties, for example a voice or video stream with TCP you would have to initiate a separate connection with each party and explicitly send copies of the data to each recipient. If you had a 1mb/s data stream and a 10mb/s network you could only, in ideal conditions, send to 10 viewers. Using a different protocol called UDP we can have the same data broadcast by the network to all parties. Multicast is a slight variation in which, with supported network equipment, only parties who are interested in the data will receive it.

Unicast describes 1 to 1 delivery, broadcast for one to many, and multicast again for one to many.

UDP datagrams are unreliable and delivery is not guaranteed to be in the same order as sent. Therefore the sender has a transmit window to retain transmitted data for recovery, and each receiver has a receiving window to re-arrange and request lost messages.

After that and with an empty directory how do we move forward?

The first step is finding all the packet formats and detailing as structures in a new header file, imaginatively pgm.h. We discover all the packet types and define all the fields. Source Path Message (SPM) is used in a complex hierarchy to define the closest network element to request repairs from and to update the status of the transmit window. PGM uses negative acknowledgments (NAKs) to handle packet loss, so that in ideal conditions there is no network overhead for acknowledgments (ACKs) as with TCP.

Packet loss detected by sequence number gap by subsequent packets or SPMs.

Every data packet has a sequence number so for a constant stream of data a receiver can easily detect a gap in the sequence numbers and initiate recovery with the sender. What happens if the sender publishes one data message and then stops? SPMs are sent after data messages to indicate the last sequence number and allow receivers to recover.