network realtime audio transmission with latency < 100 ms

Question

I need a solution to transmit one audio channel (mono) 44.1 Khz, 16 bit resp. 88.2 KB/Sec with less than 100 ms latency to a remote location. The application is for a remote concert. My software is built on Windows 10 with Max (cycling74), Java, Unity and C#. I want send data as well between the applications especially from Max to Java and Unity. I found zeromq and apache kafka as possible frameworks. I would appreciate to get some hints which tools could be suited. As I am not very experienced in network programming minimizing the effort for an implementation is also an important concern.

Answer 1

ZeroMQ is capable of sub millisecond latency on an internal network. However, I would recommend raw UDP sockets. UDP doesn't retransmit lost packets and has very low overhead compared to TCP (used by ZMQ).

You may also need to do traffic prioritization on your network to ensure a reasonable latency, but with the small quantity of data you are using it might not have a significant effect (this all depends on your specific network). I would start with implementing a UDP socket then if you are seeing unacceptable latencies try to optimize the network.