While configuring a lightweight status probe that will periodically send a single 32 byte packet to hundreds of network hosts, the technician decides reliability is not critical and wants to minimize bandwidth and CPU overhead. Which transport-layer protocol best meets these requirements, and why?
UDP; it provides built-in flow control to prevent congestion.
TCP; it can broadcast packets without establishing sessions.
TCP; its three-way handshake confirms the connection before data is sent.
UDP; it is connectionless and has minimal header overhead.
The probe needs to push a small, one-way message without establishing or maintaining a session. UDP is a connectionless protocol, so it does not perform the three-way handshake, sequencing, acknowledgments, or flow-control operations that TCP uses. This absence of session management keeps the header small (8 bytes vs. TCP's 20+ bytes) and processing overhead low, making UDP ideal when speed and reduced bandwidth matter more than guaranteed delivery. TCP, on the other hand, is connection-oriented; its handshake, acknowledgments, and retransmission features add latency and additional bytes-unnecessary for a simple, best-effort status message. The option claiming UDP provides built-in flow control is incorrect, as this is a feature of TCP. The option claiming TCP can broadcast packets is also incorrect; TCP is a unicast protocol and does not support broadcasting.
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