UDP is an acronym for User Datagram Protocol and is an integral part of Internet Protocol suite. For users with less knowledge of Internet protocol suite; it is used by programs that run on different computers, which are part of a network, in order to send or share short messages which are also called as datagrams. The user datagram protocol or UDP, unlike TCP, doesn’t guarantee the correct sequence of transferred data. Moreover, it also doesn’t guarantee any reliability of the data. The datagrams sent from one computer to another using UDP may become lost without getting into notice. Moreover, they may arrive in a different order as compared to their order when they were sent.

Benefits of UDP:

All the above factors might give an impression that UDP is not a handy protocol to use. However, regardless of its limitations and reliability issues, it still provides considerable benefits that may come handy in different scenarios. For instance, in scenarios where reliability comes after speed; UDP can be used as it provides better speed as compared to TCP. The reason for its higher speed is simple; as UDP doesn’t check whether the packet or the data has been delivered or not, therefore, it successfully avoids this overhead check. As this overhead is avoided, it results in a much faster protocol as compared to TCP. Because of these reasons, UDP is often used for real-time applications or for those applications in which speed matter more than reliability. One such example is the case where servers are really busy in giving answers to the queries from considerable number of clients. TCP is ideal for a reliable communication between a server and a dedicated client, however, UDP is much preferable for situations in which broadcast is sent from a single server to a large number of receivers or clients in a network.

Major Problems of using UDP:

Despite of its benefits, UDP still have some major problems associated with it. One of major concern of using User Datagram Protocol is that it doesn’t offer network congestion control or avoidance mechanism. That is why, in a UDP network, other forms of congestion control mechanism are required to be implemented so that UDP can offer smooth network traffic. One of the potential solutions to this problem is DCCP or the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol which is specifically designed in order to the monitor the traffic running in a UDP network.

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