UDP Protocol

AdaTrack prioritizes the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for telemetry ingestion due to its minimal overhead, which is critical for battery-powered IoT devices and unreliable network environments.

The UDP Advantage

While TCP provides reliability through handshakes and acknowledgments, these mechanisms introduce significant data overhead and power consumption. For many IoT sensors, the TCP handshake can be larger than the actual data being sent.

UDP allows for a "fire-and-forget" model:

• Lower Latency: No connection setup or teardown.

• Lower Bandwidth: Minimal header size (8 bytes).

• Power Efficient: Radio remains active for a shorter duration.

Data Packet Structure

While your specific payload is flexible (decoded via Custom Decoders), AdaTrack recommends a standard envelope for secure and reliable transmission:

Field	Size	Description
Device ID	16 Bytes	Unique identifier (UUID).
Timestamp	8 Bytes	UNIX Epoch (Big Endian). Used for ordering and replay protection.
Payload	Variable	Your proprietary binary sensor data.
Signature	32 Bytes	HMAC-SHA256 signature for authentication.

Ingestion Pipeline

When a UDP packet arrives at our ingestion endpoint (Port 1234):

1. Kernel Ring Buffer: The packet is read from the Linux kernel ring buffer. Our servers are tuned with large rmem buffers to absorb micro-bursts of traffic.

2. HMAC Verification: The backend fetches the device's shared secret and verifies the Signature. If the signature is invalid or the Timestamp is too old (> 5s), the packet is rejected.

3. Decoding: The Payload bytes are passed to the Goja JS VM for processing.

4. Storage & Distribution: The resulting JSON is stored in TimescaleDB and broadcast to connected WebSockets for real-time map updates.

Network Configuration (Self-Hosted)

If you are hosting your own AdaTrack instance, ensure your network and OS are optimized:

• Firewall: Allow incoming UDP traffic on your configured ingestion port (Default: 1234).

• Kernel Tuning: Increase the maximum receive buffer size to prevent packet loss during high traffic.

  sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=26214400

• Worker Pools: Configure the backend worker pool size based on your CPU cores to ensure parallel HMAC and decoding processing.

Reliability over UDP

Since UDP is connectionless, it does not guarantee delivery. AdaTrack handles this at the application layer:

• Idempotency: We use the device-provided timestamp to ensure that duplicate or out-of-order packets do not corrupt your historical data.

• Sequence Tracking: The system can detect missing packets by analyzing the gaps in received timestamps.