UDP

=UDP= Author: Kevin Park

UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol. UDP is a communications protocol that offers a limited amount of service when messages are exchanged between computers in a network that uses the Internet protocol and is a transport layer protocol defined for used with the Internet protocol. Application designers are generally aware that UDP does not provide any reliability. For example, UDP does not retransmit any lost packets.

UDP is almost a null protocol, the only services it provides over Internet protocol are check summing of data and multiplexing by port number. Therefore, an application program running over UDP must deal directly with end-to-end communication problems that a connection-oriented protocol would have handled. For example, retransmission for reliable delivery, flow control, congestion avoidance.

UDP is the part of the TCP/IP suite of protocols used for data transferring. UDP is a known as a "stateless" protocol, meaning it doesn't acknowledge that the packets being sent have been received. For this reason, the UDP protocol is typically used for streaming media. While you might see skips in video or hear some fuzz in audio clips, UDP transmission prevents the playback from stopping completely. =**REFERENCES:**=