N-Redundant UDP - a fault tolerance scheme for real-time notification

Abstract

UDP is a very efficient connectionless transmission model. It’s a well-suited protocol to use in real-time applications. As we know the problem with UDP is unreliability and lack of ordering. Many schemes and protocols were suggested or developed on top of UDP to make it reliable and ordered. But in all those cases we sacrifice latency to guarantee reliability. There are practical use cases where UDP is used for inter-system event notification (as an example, real-time event notification within a distributed system) where each event is transferred as a tiny datagram. In such cases increasing reliability without hampering the latency is desired. In this paper, we propose a scheme named N-redundant UDP that is suitable for transmitting small messages with increased Quality of Service than plain UDP but without adding any latency burden.