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Some common protocols which use UDP are: DNS, TFTP, ARP,
RARP and SNMP.

When people refer to "TCP/IP" remember that they are talking

about a suite of protocols, and not just one (as most people
think). TCP/IP is NOT one protocol. Please see the Protocols
section for more information.

The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is defined by IETF RFC768

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The second protocol used at the Transport layer is UDP. Application developers can
use UDPin place of TCP. UDP is the scaled-down economy model and is considered a p

p £ike a thin person in a car, a thin protocol doesn't take up a lot of room - or in this
case, much bandwidth on a network.

UDP as mentioned dosen't offer all the bells and whistles of TCP, but it does a fabulous job of
transporting information that doesn't require reliable delivery and it does so using far fewer
network resources.

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UDP is considered to be an unreliable transport protocol. When UDP sends segments over a
network, it just sends them and forgets about them. It doesn't follow through, check on
them, or even allow for an acknowledgment of safe arrival, in other words .... complete
abandonment! This does not mean that UDP is ineffective, only that it doesn't handle issues
of reliability.

The picture below shows us the UDP header within a data packet. This is to show you the
different fields a UDP header contains:



 




For those who read about TCP, you would know it is a connection oriented protocol,
but UDPisn't. This is because UDP doesn't create a virtual circuit (establish a connection
before data transfer), nor does it contact the destination before delivering information to it.
No 3-way handshake or anything like that here!

Since UDP assumes that the application will use its own reliability method, it doesn't use any,
which obviously makes things transfer faster.






The very low overhead, compared to TCP, is a result of the lack of windowing or
acknowledgments. This certainly speeds things up but you get an unreliable (in comparison
toTCP) service. There really isn't much more to write about UDP so I'll finish here.