Question

I am faced with a situation to maintain multiple timers in my socket communication program in C language. I have a client server program where both the client and the server ought to maintain a timer for every packet it send to the other machine.
The protocol I am works like this-
Every packet that machine A sends, machine B must acknowledge the same in a certain time. So a timer has to be there for every packet that machine A sends. If the timer senses timeout the socket connection must close.
This way I need to maintain timers for each and every packet. The time for time-out is same for all the packets. I am looking to know if there is any provision in C to set different timers and distinguish among them to achieve the functionality above.

Answer 1

Instead of multiple timers, you can have one timer and a queue of “events”. The queue is ordered by the time of the events. So when you send a packet, just add a disconnect-event to the event queue, and store some identifier to that event. If you receive a reply before the event fires, then remove the event from the queue.