A media company is building a platform to live-stream fast-paced esports matches to thousands of viewers worldwide. The engineering team must choose a transport-layer protocol that minimizes latency by eliminating connection establishment, acknowledgments, and retransmissions, even though a small amount of packet loss is acceptable. Which protocol best meets these requirements?
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a connectionless transport-layer protocol that does not perform handshakes, acknowledgments, or automatic retransmissions. This lightweight design reduces latency and bandwidth overhead, making UDP the preferred transport for real-time applications such as online gaming and low-latency livestreams. In contrast, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Server Message Block (SMB) either are or are built upon connection-oriented protocols that add reliability mechanisms, which increases delay and makes them less suitable for time-critical streaming.
Ask Bash
Bash is our AI bot, trained to help you pass your exam. AI Generated Content may display inaccurate information, always double-check anything important.
What is the difference between UDP and TCP?
Open an interactive chat with Bash
Why is packet loss acceptable in live streams or online gaming?
Open an interactive chat with Bash
What are examples of real-world applications that use UDP?