RDM-NET forces TCP

[sblair]

Hey Rob, welcome to the forums!

LLRP is ONLY meant to be used as a rescue protocol for devices that have incorrect network settings or settings that prevent them from establishing a TCP connection to the Broker to use RPT.

You'll notice in the E1.33 standard that there are VERY strict rules that only allow specific RDM PIDs to be used with LLRP and disallow all others. This is because LLRP does not have the scalability or any of the reliability that are built into RPT. LLRP was intentionally limited to have the most minimal configuration capabilities in order to perform just enough configuration to establish the Broker TCP connection.

If we allowed for LLRP to do more than that then it would cause enormous interoperablity issues as it would essentially create 2 different protocols for doing the same functions and it would be random as to which one someone chooses. In many cases the easier one would be picked which does not have any of the scalability or reliability needed or the synchronization for multiple clients.

To be compliant to the RDMnet protocol it really does require RPT to be implemented using TCP. We put a significant amount of effort into creating an architecture that had the most minimal TCP requirements for an end-device. In this case, only a single TCP connection is required to be supported.

I hope that helps clarify the reasoning.

Thanks.