Sending messages over an unreliable network in JAVA

Question

I need to send a continuous flow of messages (simple TextMessages with a timestamp and x/y coordinates) over a wireless network from a moving computer. There will be a lot of these short messages (like 200 per sec) and unfortunately the network connection is most likely unreliable since the sending device will leave the WLAN area from time to time... When the connection is not available, all upcoming messages should be buffered until the connection is back up again. The order of the transmitted messages does not matter, since they contain a timestamp, but ALL messages must be transferred.

What would be a simple but reliable method for sending these telegrams? Would it be possible to just use a "plain" TCP or UDP socket connection? Would messages be buffered when the connection is temporarily down and send afterwards automatically? Or is the connection loss directly detected and reported, thus I could buffer the messages and try to reconnect periodically on my own? Do libraries like Netty help here?

I also thought about using a broker to broker communication (e.g. ActiveMQ network of brokers) as an alternative. Would the overhead too big here?! Would you suggest another messaging middleware in this case?

Answer 1

TCP is guaranteed delivery (When it's connected that is) - You should check if the connection went down and put messages in a queue while it is retrying the connection. Once it sees that connection is back up dump the queue into the TCP socket.

Also look into TCP Keepalive for recognition of a down connection: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TCP-Keepalive-HOWTO/overview.html

Answer 2

Seems like you could use a message wrapper like Java JMS using a "Assured persistent" reliability mode. I have not done this myself, in the context of text messages, but this idea may lead you to the right answer. Also, there may be an Apache library already written that handles what you need, such as Qpid .