Understanding TCP and UDP
As this hour has already mentioned, TCP is a connection-oriented protocol that provides extensive error control and flow control. UDP is a connectionless protocol with much less sophisticated error control. You might say that TCP is built for reliability, and UDP is built for speed. Applications that must support interactive sessions, such as Telnet and FTP, tend to use TCP. Applications that do their own error checking or that don’t need much error checking tend to use UDP.
A software developer designing a network application can choose whether to use TCP or UDP as a transport protocol. UDP’s simpler control mechanisms should not necessarily be considered limiting. First, less quality assurance does not necessarily ...
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