Article Post

TCP

We sometimes hear people call it "the TCP/IP protocol suite," which means that they're talking about layers 1-4 plus 7, similar to how we presented layers. TCP lives at layer 4, along with its unreliable friend UDP. TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol, by the way. Remember the header picture from the IP article? When a packet is encapsulated, we'll of course have the IP header at layer 3, and immediately following is the TCP header, which becomes the "data" for the IP header. TCP includes its own jargon, just like everything else. There was Ethernet frames, IP datagrams, and now TCP segments. You can think of them all as packets, but be sure to use the correct terms when communicating with others.

UDP

UDP in short sends information or data without notifying the receiver that its sending data. UDP is considered a connectionless protocol, and does not guarantee the reliability or order the packets like TCP does. Therefor packets may be dropped and are never recovered.

Although this may sound like a bad thing, it depends on your network application. Some common network applications that use UDP include: the Domain Name System (DNS), streaming media applications such as IPTV, Voice over IP (VoIP), Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) and online games. Looking at the UDP header there is a lot less overhead when compared to TCP, this makes UDP faster for routers to route the information with less overhead on processing power.