how to send and receive data and acknowledgement asynchrounously in c++ socket tcp/ip?

Question

how to send and receive data and acknowledgement asynchrounously in c++ socket tcp/ip?, i can see in my program as when send some 145 byte data 50 times , i will be receiving the acknowledgement for the first six as it takes time to give the acknowledgement. I have tried waiting until i receive the acknowledgement for the current sent data, but it takes long time , which i dont want to do. I want to process with the data. So what i thought is i will put receive in a separate thread. and i want to process receive simultaneouly while send is happening? So Asynchronous receive will work? Can anyone help? The class which i am using to receive and send data is a static class. As i needed to call from two other classes to send data to same ip and port.

Answer 1

You can use socket for sending data in one thread and for receiving data in another thread, simultaneously. The thing you cannot do is performing the same action (sending or receiving) on the same socket from different threads.

Nevertheless, always try to avoid adding new threads if unnecessary. You can use some socket functions (select, WSAEventSelect) that will notify you when you can perform read/write on the socket. Put them in a loop in a single thread, wait for events and handle them - read/write in the same thread. If you need to process received data and that takes time, store received data in a queue shared with another, data processing thread. Of course, bear in mind you would need to make this queue thread-safe and synchronise socket and data processing thread.

Answer 2

If on Posix systems, you might need a multiplexing system call like poll or ppoll or pselect or select

If your system is non-Posix (e.g. windows) you should find some similar functionality, or use threads.