Is RTP suitable for delivery of data files to multiple recipients?

Question

I have a need to transfer files from a single, centralized source to a several hundred client machines. We currently use UDPCast to do this sort of thing, but are looking for more of a standards based approach to solving the problem.

I have been reading through the RTP RFC (1889) and notice that the protocol was primarily developed for streaming media (audio and/or video) to multiple clients. It occurred to me that it might also satisfy my needs for file transfer as well.

Of course, I would need to be able to ensure that all "blocks" of the file that I'm sending are received by each client.

Is RTP suitable for transfer of data files? Can RTCP be used to make sure that all clients receive all of the data that was sent?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Answer 1

RTP is not directly designed for reliable block transfer. While you can shoehorn stuff on top of it to implement a reliable transfer protocol using RTP as a lower layer, this is stuffing a square peg in a round hole.

File transfer protocols exist in abundance; you should probably look at something like the Bittorrent protocol, or a subset of it since you apparently don't need peer-to-peer (but you can use it as a one-to-many protocol if you want).