UDP
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UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a lightweight, connectionless transport protocol in networking. It prioritizes speed and low latency over reliability. By skipping connection establishment and delivery guarantees, UDP is ideal for time-sensitive applications where occasional data loss is acceptable.
| Advantages of UDP | Disadvantages of UDP |
|---|---|
| UDP is much faster than TCP. | UDP doesn’t care if the data is received. |
| UDP leaves the application layer (user software) to decide if there is any control over how quickly packets are sent. | It is quite flexible to software developers in this sense. |
| UDP does not reserve a continuous connection on a device as TCP does. | This means that unstable connections result in a terrible experience for the user. |
UDP Packet#
UDP packets are much simpler than TCP packets and have fewer headers. However, both protocols share some standard headers, which are what is annotated in the table below:
| Header | Description |
|---|---|
| Time to Live (TTL) | This field sets an expiry timer for the packet, so it doesn’t clog up your network if it never manages to reach a host or escape! |
| Source Address | The IP address of the device that the packet is being sent from, so that data knows where to return to. |
| Destination Address | The device’s IP address the packet is being sent to so that data knows where to travel next. |
| Source Port | This value is the port that is opened by the sender to send the UDP packet from. This value is randomly chosen (out of the ports from 0-65535 that aren’t already in use at the time). |
| Destination Port | This value is the port number that an application or service is running on the remote host (the one receiving the data); for example, a webserver running on port 80. Unlike the source port, this value is not chosen at random. |
| Data | This header is where data, i.e. bytes of a file that is being transmitted, is stored. |
UDP is stateless. No acknowledgement is sent during a connection.
UDP
https://nahil.xyz/vault/networking/network-protocols/udp/
Author Nahil Rasheed
Published at May 22, 2026
Copyright
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Disclaimer This content is provided strictly for educational purposes only.