How to set the UDP packet reassembly timeout in Windows 10

Question

I am currently developing an image aquisition application in Visual C++ that receives image data from an UDP hardware device with limited capabilities (ie no UDP checksum). The device has a GBit connection to a dedicated switch and the PC uses a dedicated NIC and a 10GBit connection to this switch.

The transmitted image data consists of packets with a size ranging from 6528 to 19680 bytes. These packets are fragmented by the hardware device and reconstructed by the network stack on the PC.

Sometimes a packet (call it packet #4711) is lost and the PC side tries to reconstruct it for a long time. Within this timespan a new packet with the same packed id is sent by the hardware device because of an overflow of the 16-bit packet id. Now the PC receives new fragments for (a new) packet #4711 and uses it to complete the old, still unassembled packet and assembles a damaged packet . To top it, the remaining fragments of the new #4711 packet are stored and combined with the next #4711 (which will be received a few seconds later). So the longer the system runs, the more packet ids will be compromised until no communication is possible at all.

We cannot calculate the UDP checksum on the hardware device because of it's limited capabilities.

We cannot use IPv6 (which would offer bigger packet ids) because there is no support for the hardware device.

We will have to implement our own protocol on top of UDP and "manually" fragment and reconstruct the data, but we could avoid this if we could find a way to reduce the packet reconstruction timeout on Windows to 500ms or less.

I searched Google and Stackoverflow for information, but there are not many results and none of them was of much help.

Hence the question: Is there a way to reduce the reconstruction timeout for IPv4 UDP fragments on Windows 10 via Registry, Windows API or any other magic or do you have a better suggestion?

Answer 1

Since Windows 2000 its hardcoded there is no official way of modifying the ip packet reassembly timeout because of the strict RFC 2460 compatibility.

Details can be read here: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/nettracer/2010/06/03/why-doesnt-ipreassemblytimeout-registry-key-take-effect-on-windows-2000-or-later-systems/

Currently the only possibility seems to use raw-sockets which are limited since Windows 7 and not available with every socket provider. This would make the application much more complex.

We will alter our software protocol so that no packets > 1400 Byte are being send at all. This forces us to care about fragmentation in our software but prevents IP packet fragmentation and all of its traps. Perhaps this is the correct way to handle such problems.