C - UDP receiving packets from unknown sources

Question

I'm relatively new to programming C sockets and I have to solve a task in C. There are multiple nodes in the network, each with its own settings. Each node broadcasts its current settings every second. It also has to listen for these broadcasts from other nodes and store their settings too. Finally, it has to be able to send a packet to another node directly. I'm planning to store all node settings in a struct array.

I've managed to finish the broadcast, which is implemented in its own thread, but I'm not sure what is the correct procedure to receive packets from unknown number of other nodes in the network and store their addresses for sending packets to them directly later.

Any tips?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Thanks for all the advice.

In the end, I just chose to compare each incoming packet's origin IP with all the registered units and if no match was found, I added a new one, storing the IP in the unit struct.