I am trying to develop a server-client paradigm based application suite. I am planning the app to work with both tcp and sctp protocol support. Now my question is if any of the TCP/SCTP packet is lost, then should I explicitly maintain application level re-transmission mechanism? Or re-transmission is handled by the TCP/SCTP protocol?
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2Hi, please don't forget to accept the answer that was helpful to you– Mike PenningtonJul 31, 2013 at 9:53
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Did any answer help you? if so, you should accept the answer so that the question doesn't keep popping up forever, looking for an answer. Alternatively, you could provide and accept your own answer.– Ron Maupin ♦Aug 9, 2017 at 23:22
2 Answers
Retransmission is handled by the underlying transport protocol, so no you don't have to worry about it.
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@generalnetworkerror, the OP is not asking about application-level failover. He is asking whether TCP / SCTP can recover from packet loss, or whether the OP needs to implement it (as UDP transport would require) in their application. Jul 30, 2013 at 11:05
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While working on SIGTRAN protocol(RFC 4666 which uses SCTP/TCP protocol ) I found that, there is provision for message re-transmission. I am confused if SCTP/TCP manages re-transmission then why they have kept provision for re-transmission handling on application level. Aug 1, 2013 at 6:15
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Who knows? It is irrelevant anyway: SCTP and TCP provide segment retransmission in the event of a loss.– PugletAug 1, 2013 at 22:33
In case of TCP, you need not worry about handling dropped packets during the connection. But in case you want to have ability to handle dropped connections, handling re-transmission at application level may make sense.
TCP terminates the connection when it gets RST (which may be due to some network error or new firewall policy). If you don't want to drop the data which is received till then and start afresh, but would like to continue from the point, till which you have received data - you can implement some kind of ordering scheme at application level and handle re-transmissions.