Group messaging of computers over internet

Question

I want to be able to send messages between computers on the internet network but with minimal functionality

requirement are- 1)computers can join/leave the group (I expect the group size to be a maximum of 5-10) 2)any message generated by any computer will be sent to every other node (this is the main requirement and I have short messages which need to be sent in shortest possible time: suggest network layer protocol to be used here), message wont be resent or ack (except leave)..but I still want to maintain high reliability, can I maintain it without receiving acks?

one problem would be to communicate on the internet I will need some sort of NAT support? how can this be managed without a stun server?

Should I use a p2p library? as I think most of the features they offer wont be needed by me could anyone suggest some here?

I'm working in C++.

Answer 1

Why not just use TCP? The server can be a simple relay server or an off-the-shelf IRC server. Do you have some kind of critical latency requirement? Or high throughput requirement? If not, I would just pull the server off the shelf.

Answer 2

2 ways I see:

• Classic client/server model with UDP connections
• P2P model

Client/server is the easiest since you don't have to worry about port forwarding.

Pick whichever is best for your app

Answer 3

You could have a look at ZeroMQ. It's basically a very efficient message queue with support for different transport protocols. Besides others, it implements a Publish-Subscribe model where a node can publish messages that will be received by all subscriber nodes. It is very lightweight and it works on Windows, Linux and Mac. Maybe this is a good starting point...?

Note that there is also a Qt binding (nzmqt) for it (just in case you want to use Qt for your project).