Let’s see what is UDP – User Datagram Protocol. Inside the computer world, term “networking” is denoted to the physical joining of two machines for different purposes like communication and data distribution. But mesh of this hardware and computer’s software can communicated with each other with the help of specially designed protocols. Moreover, computer networks can be categorized on the basis of such communication languages (protocols) used by a network.
The UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is one amongst the core constituents of the internet protocols suite. This network protocols set is specially introduced for the internet in the year 1980. So computer applications over internet can correspond through messages with User Datagram Protocol’s help. In such cases, these are also known as datagram.
UDP is simply an OSI model’s transport layer’s protocol that is designed for client/server networking applications. UDP can be used as the main alternative to another protocol TCP.
UDP Practice
In order to obtain the higher performance, UDP protocol is being used in establishing live connection with the help of videoconferencing applications. But this protocol provides good results in the computer games as well. For enjoying synchronized performance, UDP will drop down the individual datagram packets exclusive of any revision. And as a result, UDP packets are reached to their destination in an orderly form other than those were sent by communicating application. Well! UDP is a connectionless (no link establishment) Transport layer’s protocol. But it provides the same consistency as another protocol named as TCP does.
Function of UDP is quite like a postal mail service. Datagram packets are just launched without any tracking of them. Furthermore, no acknowledgement is made by the receiver. Similarly, sending device might not be aware of that they are either reached to destination or get lost anywhere on the way. Main benefit of this protocol usage is just its fast speed because there is less checking throughout the sending course of action than TCP.
Besides video/audio streaming and online game, some other applications where connection reliability isn’t important UDP can be used simply.
UDP Datagram’s structure
UDP traffic is sent in the form of datagrams and a single datagram unit is consisted on only one message. But remember, its 1st eight bytes are containing header information while left over bytes are consisted on the data relating to message. Datagram header is enclosed 4 fields of: source port number, destination port number, datagram size and checksum. Furthermore, in order to create a host-to-host connection for communication, UDP applications can be used datagram sockets. These applications can as well bind sockets to their ending points of data (an IP address plus a service port) ready for transmission.
Another thing to be noted is that, UDP is implemented a simply designed transmission model with no implicit practice like handshaking dialogues which provides reliability and data ordering etc. Briefly, UDP datagrams can be arrived to their destination out of order too. That means a stream of packets can contain duplicate data too. But efficiency in transferring data is its plus point over the TCP protocol.