Your company is developing a real-time multiplayer game that needs to transmit frequent position updates as quickly as possible. The game can tolerate occasional lost packets as long as latency stays low. Which transport layer protocol should the networking component primarily use to meet these requirements?
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a connectionless, low-overhead transport protocol. It does not guarantee delivery, order, or error correction, which eliminates the delays caused by acknowledgments and retransmissions in TCP. This makes UDP the preferred choice for latency-sensitive applications like real-time multiplayer games, where a small amount of packet loss is acceptable and speed is vital. TCP, SCTP, and ICMP either add reliability overhead (TCP, SCTP) or serve different purposes (ICMP) and therefore are not ideal for this scenario.
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What are the main characteristics of UDP that make it suitable for real-time multiplayer games?
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How does TCP differ from UDP in terms of data transmission for online gaming?
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