Receiving data in TCP

Question

If i send 1000 bytes in TCP, does it guarantee that the receiver will get the entire 1000 bytes \"togther\"? or perhaps he will first only get 500 bytes, and later he\'ll re

Answer 1

You decide, in your message that how many bytes your message shall contain. For instance in your case its 1000. Following is up and running C# code to achieve the same. The method returns with 1000 bytes. The abort code is 0 bytes; you can tailor that according to your needs.

Usage:

strMsg = ReadData(thisTcpClient.Client, 1000, out bDisconnected);

Following is the method:

    string ReadData(Socket sckClient, int nBytesToRead, out bool bShouldDisconnect)
    {
        bShouldDisconnect = false;

        byte[] byteBuffer = new byte[nBytesToRead];
        Array.Clear(byteBuffer, 0, byteBuffer.Length);

        int nDataRead = 0;
        int nStartIndex = 0;

        while (nDataRead < nBytesToRead)
        {

            int nBytesRead = sckClient.Receive(byteBuffer, nStartIndex, nBytesToRead - nStartIndex, SocketFlags.None);

            if (0 == nBytesRead)
            {
                bShouldDisconnect = true;
                //0 bytes received; assuming disconnect signal
                break;
            }

            nDataRead += nBytesRead;
            nStartIndex += nBytesRead;
        }

        return Encoding.Default.GetString(byteBuffer, 0, nDataRead);
    }

Let us know this didn't help you (0: Good luck.

Answer 2

As other answers indicated, TCP is a stream protocol -- every byte sent will be received (once and in the same order), but there are no intrinsic "message boundaries" -- whether all bytes are sent in a single .send call, or multiple ones, they might still be received in one or multiple .receive calls.

So, if you need "message boundaries", you need to impose them on top of the TCP stream, IOW, essentially, at application level. For example, if you know the bytes you're sending will never contain a \0, null-terminated strings work fine; various methods of "escaping" let you send strings of bytes which obey no such limitations. (There are existing protocols for this but none is really widespread or widely accepted).

Answer 3

It depends of the stablished MTU (Maximum transfer unit). If your stablished connection (once handshaked) refers to a MTU of 512 bytes you will need two or more TCP packets to send 1000 bytes.

Answer 4

The only thing that the TCP layer guarantees is that the receiver will receive:

• all the bytes transmitted by the sender
• in the same order

There are no guarantees at all about how the bytes might be split up into "packets". All the stuff you might read about MTU, packet fragmentation, maximum segment size, or whatever else is all below the layer of TCP sockets, and is irrelevant. TCP provides a stream service only.

With reference to your question, this means that the receiver may receive the first 500 bytes, then the next 500 bytes later. Or, the receiver might receive the data one byte at a time, if that's what it asks for. This is the reason that the recv() function takes a parameter that tells it how much data to return, instead of it telling you how big a packet is.