What Is User Datagram Protocol(UDP) and What Is It Used for?

What Is UDP

What is UDP? UDP is the abbreviation of the user datagram protocol. It is one of the core members of the Internet protocol suite. It does not require error checking and recovery services. UDP continuously sends datagrams to receivers, regardless of whether you are received. Now, you can continue to read this post from MiniTool to get more information about it.

What Is UDP Used for?

What is UDP used for? The user datagram protocol method is mainly used for time-sensitive applications and servers that respond to small queries from a larger customer base. UDP is compatible with packet broadcasting and can be used for sending across the network and for multicast sends.

It is also used in the domain name system, IP voice, and online games. Maybe you are interested in this post – How to Flush DNS Resolver Cache in Windows 10/8.1/7.

How Does It Work

Now, let’s see how does the user datagram protocol work. UDP uses a simple transmission method with no implicit handshake dialogue for sequence, reliability, or data integrity. It also assumes that it’s not essential to check the error and correct it. Besides, they are not performed in the application to avoid the overhead of such processing at the network interface level.

Advantages and Disadvantages of User Datagram Protocol

Following are the advantages and disadvantages of the user datagram protocol:

Advantages

• It supports broadcast and multicast transmission.
• Small transaction ( DNS lookup).
• Bandwidth-intensive applications that can withstand packet loss.
• The recipient of UDP packets gets them unmanaged, which also includes block boundaries.
• It will never restrict you to a connection-based communication model. This is why the startup delay in distributed applications is short.

Disadvantages

• The user datagram protocol mostly likes to suffer from worse packet loss.
• It may cause data loss.
• Routers are quite careless with UDP, so they never retransmit it if it collides.
• UDP has no Congestion Control, and flow control, so implementation is the job of a user application.
• In the user datagram protocol, a data packet may not be transmitted or transmitted twice.

UDP VS TCP

TCP/IP can help you determine how a particular computer should connect to the Internet and how to transfer data between them. When connecting multiple computer networks, it can help you create a virtual network. You may ask – what is the main difference between TCP and UDP? You can continue to read this part about UDP vs TCP to find the answer.

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• UDP is a connectionless protocol while TCP is a connection-oriented protocol.
• UDP’s speed is faster than TCP.
• UDP uses no handshake protocols while TCP uses handshake protocols such as SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK.
• TCP does error checking and also makes error recovery. However, UDP performs error checking, but it discards erroneous packets.
• TCP has acknowledgment segments while UDP does not have any acknowledgment segment.
• UDP is lightweight and TCP is heavy-weight.

You may don’t know if you should use TCP or UDP. The following are some references. TCP is best used for applications that require high reliability and do not care about timing.

• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Email (SMTP, IMAP/POP)
• World Wide Web (HTTP, HTTPS)
• Secure Shell (SSH)

UDP is best suited for applications that require speed and efficiency.

• Streaming videos
• Domain Name System (DNS)
• Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
• VPN tunneling
• Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP)
• Online games
• Live broadcasts

Final Words

What is UDP? What is UDP used for? Now, you may have found the answers to the questions. Besides, you can know how it works the advantages and the disadvantages of it. What’s more, you can get some information about TCP vs UDP. If you want to learn some information about the user datagram protocol, you can refer to this post.