Boost ASIO UDP asynchronous server

Having already seen how to establish an ASIO UDP synchronous connection and how create ASIO TCP asynchronous server, we sort of put them together to write an ASIO UDP asynchronous server.

Main

As client we could happily recycle the one written for the UPD synchronous connection - only, be sure to use the same IP protocol for both. So in the main function we just instantiate an ASIO io_context (also known as io_service), pass it by reference to the ctor of a Server object, and then call run() on it.

In a second time, while running a number of clients to play with the app, you would want to run io also in other threads - be sure to do that between the server creation and the io run on the current thread.

Server class

The server would sit on port 50013 and send to the clients always the same message, concatenated with to a counter. To work it needs an ASIO UPD socket and a UDP endpoint that would identify the current client.

// ...
const int HELLO_PORT = 50'013;
const std::string MSG("Async UDP hello from ASIO ");

class Server
{
private:
 udp::socket socket_;
 udp::endpoint endpoint_;
 uint16_t counter_ = 0;
// ...
public:
 Server(ba::io_context& io) : socket_(io, udp::endpoint(udp::v6(), HELLO_PORT))
 {
  start();
 }
};

The server ctor sets the socket data member up using the reference to the ASIO io context received from the instantiator and a UDP endpoint created on the fly, specifying the required IP protocol (here version 6) and the server port.

Then the server start() private method is called:

void start()
{
 std::array<char, 0> buffer;  // 1
 socket_.async_receive_from(ba::buffer(buffer), endpoint_,
  std::bind(&Server::recvHandler, this, std::placeholders::_1));  // 2
 std::cout << "Server ready" << std::endl;
}

1. The client is expected to send an empty message, so the receive buffer could be zero sized.
2. We call async_receive_from() to receive asynchronously from the client a message in buffer. We'll get the client endpoint information in the data member and, on receive completion, it will call another Server's private method, recvHandler(), passing to it the first parameter that ASIO was expected to send, namely a reference to the boost system error_code describing how the async_receive_from() was completed.

If no error was detected in async_receive_from(), the recvHandler() creates a message and sends it to the client:

void recvHandler(const bs::error_code& error)
{
 if (!error)
 {
  std::shared_ptr<std::string> data(new std::string(MSG + std::to_string(++counter_)));  // 1

  socket_.async_send_to(ba::buffer(*data), endpoint_,
   std::bind(&Server::sendHandler, this, data, std::placeholders::_1, std::placeholders::_2));  // 2
  start();
 }
}

1. This piece of code is a bit involuted. We create on the heap a string containing the data to be send to the client, and we wrap it in a shared pointer. In this way we can keep it alive in a multithreading environment until we need it, that is, the end of the sendHandler() method invoked by async_send_to() at the end of its operation.
2. async_send_to() uses the endpoint set by async_receive_from() to know where sending the data. At the end, sendHandler() is called.

From the ASIO point of view, sendHandler() could be an empty method. The only important thing is that the data created in recvHandler() gets here in the shared smart pointer, so that it can ensure it not to be destroyed when still required.

void sendHandler(std::shared_ptr<std::string> data, const bs::error_code& error, std::size_t size)
{
 if (!error)
 {
  std::cout << size << " byte sent from [" << *data << "]" << std::endl;
 }
}

I pushed the full C++ source code on GitHub. It is based on the Daytime.6 example from the official Boost ASIO tutorial.