Introduction

reliable is a simple packet acknowledgement system for UDP-based protocols.

It has the following features:

Acknowledgement when packets are received
Packet fragmentation and reassembly
RTT and packet loss estimates

reliable is stable and production ready.

Usage

Reliable is designed to operate with your own network socket library.

If you don't have one already, try netcode, it was designed to work well with reliable.

First, create an endpoint on each side of the connection:

struct reliable_config_t config;

reliable_default_config( &config );

config.max_packet_size = 32 * 1024;
config.fragment_above = 1200;
config.max_fragments = 32;
config.fragment_size = 1024;
config.transmit_packet_function = transmit_packet;
config.process_packet_function = process_packet;

reliable_endpoint_t * endpoint = reliable_endpoint_create( &config, time );
if ( endpoint == NULL )
{
  printf( "error: could not create endpoint\n" );
  exit(1);
}

For example, in a client/server setup you would have one endpoint on each client, and n endpoints on the server, one for each client slot.

Next, create a function to transmit packets:

static void transmit_packet( void * context, uint64_t id, uint16_t sequence, uint8_t * packet_data, int packet_bytes )
{
    // send packet using your own udp socket
}

And a function to process received packets:

static int process_packet( void * context, uint64_t id, uint16_t sequence, uint8_t * packet_data, int packet_bytes )
{
    // read the packet here and process its contents, return 0 if the packet should not be acked
    return 1;
}

For each packet you receive from your udp socket, call this on the endpoint that should receive it:

reliable_endpoint_receive_packet( endpoint, packet_data, packet_bytes );

Now you can send packets through the endpoint:

reliable_endpoint_send_packet( endpoint, packet_data, packet_bytes );

And get acks like this:

int num_acks;
uint16_t * acks = reliable_endpoint_get_acks( endpoint, &num_acks );
for ( int i = 0; i < num_acks; i++ )
{
    printf( "acked packet %d\n", acks[j] );
}

Once you process all acks, clear acks on the endpoint:

reliable_endpoint_clear_acks( endpoint );

And make sure to update each endpoint once per-frame, so it keeps track of network connection stats like latency, packet loss and bandwidth sent, received and acked:

reliable_endpoint_update( endpoint, time );

When you are finished with an endpoint, destroy it:

reliable_endpoint_destroy( endpoint );

Author

The author of this library is Glenn Fiedler.

Open source libraries by the same author include: netcode, serialize, and yojimbo

If you find this software useful, please consider sponsoring it. Thanks!

Source Code

This repository holds the implementation of reliable in C.

Other reliable implementations include:

reliable Rust implementation

Contributors

These people are awesome:

Walter Pearce - Rust Implementation

License