Network Programming in Elixir and Erlang

Ordering, Splitting, and Dropping Packets

Let’s start by understanding the effects of UDP’s lack of guarantees when it comes to our protocol and application. Then, we’ll take a look at ways to overcome these challenges.

UDP is not into guarantees at all. The protocol provides you with a way to route packets from one peer to another and not much else. The only real guarantee you have is that the packets don’t end up at the wrong destination, but that’s about it. When you look at it from an application developer’s perspective, these are the main things to be aware of (that result from this lack of guarantees):

• Packets can be dropped
• Packets can be delivered in any order

These two characteristics, once combined, lead to a third: larger packets, ...