The User Datagram Protocol
Explore the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), a connectionless transport layer protocol that offers minimal overhead and fast data transmission. Understand UDP's header structure, how it handles error detection, its lack of delivery guarantees, and why it is preferred for specific applications. This lesson prepares you to grasp UDP's role in network communication and sets the stage for studying related protocols.
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What is UDP?
UDP, or User Datagram Protocol, is a transport layer protocol that works over the network layer’s famous Internet protocol (which we’ll look at in-depth in the next chapter). RFC 768 is the official RFC for UDP.
How It Works
UDP does not involve any initial handshaking like TCP does, and is hence called a connectionless protocol. This means that there are no established ‘connections’ between hosts.
UDP prepends the source and destination ports to messages from the application layer and hands them off to the network ...