TCP would be fine if it had the concept of message, in addition to stream. The sender sends a message. It flows to the recipient. The recipient program can specify that a receive receives the entire message, no more and no less, as long as the application's target input buffer is large enough.
SCTP does this.
A shim on top of TCP socket receive could also do this also, as long as there is a convention to prefix each message with a length field, say 16 bits, with the MSB indicating that the message is incomplete and is continued in the next length delimited segment.
Comments
TCP would be fine if it had the concept of message, in addition to stream. The sender sends a message. It flows to the recipient. The recipient program can specify that a receive receives the entire message, no more and no less, as long as the application's target input buffer is large enough.
SCTP does this.
A shim on top of TCP socket receive could also do this also, as long as there is a convention to prefix each message with a length field, say 16 bits, with the MSB indicating that the message is incomplete and is continued in the next length delimited segment.