I will soon be joining a cross discipline team that will create a
multimedia application for Microsoft Windows. I am a systems
administrator and not a developer. I would like to get a "head start"
before talking with the developers. In my research I discovered the
UDP-lite transport. It appears to be helpful for multimedia
applications. I am trying to determine the level of difficulty of
creating and installing our own UDP-lite transport protocol on MS
Windows. My question is not whether UDP-lite is the optimal transport.
The purpose of my question is to determine if a proficient TCP/IP
developer (I realize this is a very relative term) could fairly easily
write a UDP-lite transport that would easily install on the Windows
platform. Additionally, in very general terms how might this work from
an installation perspective?

I understand UDP-lite to be a transport protocol. (See
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3828.html for more details on the
specifics of UDP-lite -- however, the question is more about
installing a 3rd party transport protocol).   UDP transport is already
provided by MS Windows. To the best of my knowledge, presently MS
Windows does not provide  UDP-lite support. UDP-lite is reportedly
very close to UDP.  I would like to be able
create a user-space application installation package  that "drops in"
our udp-lite transport protocol. Our multimedia application would then
utilize this udp-lite application.

Is this possible? Is this "relatively" easy for experienced
developers? Would there be any major "gotchas"?

If this approach is wrong is there a better way to implement UDP-lite?
Do we have to be more intrusive into the Windows operating system? In
general, how would this work?

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Request for Question Clarification by maniac-ga on 13 Sep 2005 19:26 PDT

Hello Jakers99,

It appears (but I cannot confirm directly) that Microsoft already
implements UDP-Lite (though perhaps a draft version) in Windows Server
2003 or Windows XP if you chose to switch to the IPv6 protocol. See
  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/ipv6rfc.mspx
for a list of protocols supported by the IPv6 implementation.

Would this be an acceptable solution or do you need a solution that
can be implemented on an IPv4 stack?

  --Maniac

---

Clarification of Question by jakers99-ga on 13 Sep 2005 20:04 PDT

I'm sorry. I should have been more explicit. It would need to run on the IPv4 stack.

---

Request for Question Clarification by maniac-ga on 20 Sep 2005 16:54 PDT

Hello Jakers99,

If your comment is referring to the comment made by vakulgarg-ga, I
suggest you close the question so you cannot be charged for an
"answer". Comments are offered freely by the person making them.

  --Maniac

Hello Jakers999

Developing UDP-Lite for windows should be straight forward and the developer 
just need to be familiar with programming with raw sockets which would
then give access to send UDP-Lite datagrams directly over IP layer.
However for the application to use raw sockets, I guess it should have
admin/poweruser previledges. (I can check over this if you are
interested).

Since UDP-Lite has been allocated separate protocol identifier (136),
there are no chances of your application interfering with existing
UDP.

- Vakul

Great. That's the answer I was looking for. Thank you. 

I am new to Google Answers and do not know what the next step is. I
think I'm supposed to rate answers? However, I do not see a
button/option to do this.