The Minimalist File Transfer Protocol (MFTP)

Welcome to the home of the Minimalist File Transfer Protocol (MFTP), a lightweight and reliable protocol designed for data transfer over UDP. MFTP ensures data integrity and reliability through mechanisms such as CRC32 checks, acknowledgments (ACKs), and retransmission strategies, including an exponential backoff mechanism to prevent network congestion.

Overview

MFTP is specifically tailored for use in environments where TCP's overhead is undesirable or impractical. This makes it particularly well-suited for Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded platforms, where resources such as memory and processing power are limited.

Advantages

Lightweight: MFTP has minimal protocol overhead, making it ideal for constrained environments.
Reliable Data Transfer: Ensures 100% accuracy of data transfer using CRC32 checks and ACKs.
Efficient Data Transfer: Data packets contain exactly 512 bytes of data with no additional overhead.
Efficient Retransmission: Uses an exponential backoff strategy to handle packet loss and avoid network congestion.
Easy Implementation: Simple to implement in low-power devices and small-scale systems.

Disadvantages

Speed: MFTP is slower than TCP, making it unsuitable for high-speed data transfers or streaming high bitrate audio in real-time.
Not for Large Files: The protocol's efficiency diminishes with very large files due to its retransmission strategy.
Limited Use Cases: Best suited for small to medium-sized data transfers in specific scenarios like firmware updates or configuration file transfers in IoT devices.

Use Cases

MFTP is ideal for use in scenarios where reliability and low overhead are paramount. Some potential applications include:

Firmware updates for IoT devices
Configuration file transfers in embedded systems
Data logging and sensor data transmission

Performance Enhancement

While the MFTP’s throughput may initially appear limited compared to conventional reliable data protocols, leveraging multi-path transmission across multiple ports significantly enhances its bandwidth capabilities. This approach requires a straightforward protocol for port negotiation, ensuring efficient data distribution.

In practice, the protocol would allocate file segments to ports sequentially, with the lowest port number handling the initial segment and the highest port number managing the final segment.

Once the port negotiation is complete, the MFTP can operate concurrently on each port without modification, thus providing a reliable and scalable solution for data transfer over UDP.

Learn More

For a detailed specification and source code, please refer to the following links:

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