What is UDP?
Advanced – Web/Development
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You may ask “What is UDP? A UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol. It’s a protocol used to send, receive data between two computers in a network. It in charge of transmitting small data packets. Additionally, the header size of UDP is 8 bytes.
User Datagram Protocol is a connectionless oriented protocol. Unlike TCP, this protocol does not establish a session before it enables communication between the two computers. With this in mind, it’s important to know that it sends a data packet only once.
When a corrupted data packet is detected by the UDP protocol, it will not try to recover it. In most cases, the corrupted segment will be discarded.
Therefore, the User Datagram Protocol does not guarantee data delivery or in-order packet delivery between two computers. This means if you use it to send data, it does not guarantee that you will receive all the data at the other end. However, due to not guaranteeing data delivery and not having congestion control, UDP is faster than TCP protocol. To conclude, you can now answer the question “What is UDP” and what it does.