Suitability for very low-bandwidth links?

[jgoerzen]

Hi,

This isn't an issue, but I couldn't find contact information for you anywhere.

First, thanks for writing this. It looks interesting!

I am interested in very low-bandwidth, long-distance radio links. These may be via amateur radio protocols, via LoRA (my own lorapipe, https://github.com/jgoerzen/lorapipe works with that), or satellite. Bandwidth of these links ranges, depending on the technology in play, from about 0.3Kbps to 100Kbps. Many of them are actually packetized already, and may provide guarantees roughly similar to UDP (error-checked but not reliable, though most guarantee ordering if not delivery). So you can perhaps see why I'm interested in this protocol. Those that are packetized would tend to use packets ranging from about 32 bytes up to maybe several hundred bytes, with an ethernet-like MTU of 1500 being a rather high-end outlier.

My question is: what is the overhead of your reliable protocol when working with a pure binary stream? Also, do you think it would be suitable for situations in which it may actually take a substantial fraction of a second for a packet to be transmitted (or maybe even several seconds for the very slowest)? When dealing with a 300bps link, every added byte definitely counts!

Thanks!