THE Internet: UDP

Last time, I talked about how a protocol called TCP makes the Internet go. Today's it's UDP.

The other common protocol comparable to TCP is UDP, or user datagram protocol, which is faster than TCP.

Information can be sent using UDP when the recipient doesn’t care if the transmission loses a bit or two along the way, which is the case with streaming audio or video. A few bits dropped out of a Frank Sinatra song can only improve it, and who is going to miss a pixel or two from the face of Tommy Lee Jones?

With UDP communications, there is no handshake, no acknowledgment, and no error checking. It’s kind of like being a teenager whose parents are gone for the weekend. The sender just tosses its packets to the wind and hopes they get there. Obviously, it does send them to a specific address, as “destination address” is one of the fields in the UDP header, but, it has no way of knowing whether the receiving system is still listening.