Reliable multicast communication in LAN

I have a network application working on Linux. What I want to do is to make my application able to announce it's presence in LAN and then notify other applications about some changes. Because I don't know how many instances of my application already works on other hosts in LAN I cannot use SCTP, multicast communication is the only way (or maybe you know other solution?).

Structure I want to send over multicast address has fixed size (320 bytes) and contains binary data, which are in开发者_运维问答 fact structure of numbers and bit flags.

I'm wondering if there are any well-know programming techniques, which can make UDP communication a bit more reliable. I only figured out two things:

1. I drop all packets received by recvmsg() which are smaller then 320 bytes.
2. I surround every packet with with well-know header and footer, and then check them each time when I receive new message, however packet still can be damaged somewhere in the middle right?

Edit: I found a PGN protocol, but the only Linux implementation is known to work on x86. It's partial solution for me, because I want to run my program on ARM architecture too

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You can try porting PGM to ARM, there are not that many requirements in OpenPGM, it already runs fine on IBM s390 mainframes for example.

Disclosure: I'm the author of OpenPGM \:D/