UDPNAM

UDPNAM is a network protocol that provides a reliable datagram service over an unreliable datagram network. It is designed to add reliability features to UDP (User Datagram Protocol) without the overhead of a full connection-oriented protocol like TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). UDPNAM achieves reliability through mechanisms such as acknowledgments, retransmissions, and sequence numbering.

When a sender transmits data using UDPNAM, it assigns a sequence number to each datagram. The receiver, upon receiving a datagram, sends an acknowledgment back to the sender. If the sender does not receive an acknowledgment within a certain timeout period, it will retransmit the datagram. Sequence numbers are used to detect duplicate datagrams and to reorder datagrams that may arrive out of sequence due to network conditions.

UDPNAM can be implemented in a user-space library or as part of the operating system's network stack. Its primary use cases are applications that require datagram-style communication but cannot tolerate the inherent unreliability of UDP, such as certain real-time applications, gaming, or specialized data transfer protocols. It offers a middle ground between the speed of UDP and the robustness of TCP, allowing developers to choose the level of reliability needed for their specific application.