5.1. Overview
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a commonly used transport protocol employed by many types of applications. UDP is a connectionless transport protocol, meaning that it doesn't guarantee either packet delivery or that packets arrive in sequential order. Rather than reading from, and writing to, an ordered sequence of bytes (using I/O streams, as discussed in Chapter 4), bytes of data are grouped together in discrete packets, which are sent over the network. Although control over the ultimate destination of a UDP packet rests with the computer that sends it, how it reaches that destination is an arbitrary process (see Figure 5-1).
Figure 5-1. UDP packet transport over a network can be unreliable.
The packets may travel along different ...
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