User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is an alternative communications protocol to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used primarily to establish loss-tolerant connections between two applications on the Internet. Both UDP and TCP run over the Internet Protocol (IP) in the transport layer and are sometimes referred to as UDP/IP or TCP/IP. Both protocols send short data packets in the form of datagrams. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay In recent times, the broadcast control protocol has emerged as the dominant protocol used for most Internet connectivity due to services such as breaking large data sets into individual datagrams, checking acknowledgments, resend lost packets and reassembling the packets in the correct sequence. But these services come at a cost in terms of additional data overhead and delays. In contrast, the user data protocol simply forwards packets without acknowledgments and without resending services, effectively reducing bandwidth overhead and latency issues. As a result, packets can be lost or received out of order, due to the different paths that individual packets traverse between sender and receiver. It provides two additional services on the Internet Protocol layer. It provides port numbers to help distinguish different user requests and a checksum calculation capability to verify that the data arrived intact. In UDP connection, the client sets unique source port numbers based on the program with which it initiated the connection. UDP is not limited to 1-to-1 interaction. You can provide 1-to-many interaction using broadcast or multi-cast addressing. A many-to-1 interaction can be provided by many clients communicating with a single server. A many-to-many interaction is just an extension of these techniques. UDP is an attractive option for applications that have low latency as a critical requirement. These applications could range from voice and video communication to real-time gaming and video streaming. These applications would compromise the loss of some data as long as the quality received is up to the required standards. In some cases, error correction techniques may be necessary to improve the quality of the transmission. Below are some important characteristics of UDP transmission: Please note: This is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay It is a connectionless end-to-end delivery protocol. It is unreliable as the established communication consists only of data packets without any confirmation. Just like the Internet Protocol, it is a best-effort network. It can be used for real-time applications since it is a real-time transport protocol. UDP transmits segments consisting of an 8-byte header. Contains the source port, destination port, UDP length, and checksum. UDP checksum used to detect errors in the transmitted segment.