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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:11:00
Bill Frantz (frantz@netcom.com)
Fri, 21 Aug 1998 21:04:09 -0800
At 10:23 PM -0800 8/20/98, proff@iq.org wrote:
>> Must be. If I recall correctly, the topic was about building a chat
>>program.
>> If you use TCP broadcasts, you've two choices: 255.255.255.255 which will
>> certainly be filtered by your router, or direct broadcasts which will be
>>sent
>> to the broadcast address of that net.
>[...] blah
>
>TCP doesn't do broadcasts and never will. Talking about netmasks
>won't encourage it. It's a windowed handshaking protocol.
There are two kinds of broadcast protocol. Pure broadcast (e.g. radio, TV)
don't know or much care about their receivers.
An alternative is a "reliable" broadcast protocol. In order to be reliable,
it needs to know the intended listeners. I can imagine a TCP-like protocol
which maintains ACK information for each intended listener and does the
maximal pessimistic retransmission. It would have to inform it's user
about each individual transmission failure.
In the common case of minimal packet loss/error, it would save bandwidth.
With more loss/error, there would need to be intelligent switches which
only broadcast the retransmissions in the directions which need them, or
the bandwidth requirements might be larger than just a set of
point-to-point TCP connections.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz | If hate must be my prison | Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506 | lock, then love must be | 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz@netcom.com | the key. - Phil Ochs | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:11:00