TCP Vs UDP: When setting up your router, you might have come across the terms TCP and UDP. You may be wondering what TCP and UDP mean and want to know more about them. This article explains what TCP and UDP mean and also explains their differences.
Short for Transmission Control Protocol, TCP is a feature that helps computers communicate over the internet. It is one of the main protocols in TCP/IP networks. TCP provides error-checking and guarantees delivery of data and that packets will be delivered in the order they were sent.
A TCP connection works by first establishing with the help of a three-way handshake. This is the process of initiating and acknowledging a connection. Once the connection is established, the data transfer begins, and when the transmission process is finished, the connection is canceled by the closing of an established virtual circuit.
Short for User Datagram Protocol, UDP is a connectionless protocol that works just like TCP but assumes that error-checking and recovery services are not required. Instead, it steadily sends datagrams to the recipient whether they receive them or not.
UDP functions by a simple transmission method without implied hand-shaking dialogues for ordering, reliability, or data integrity. UDP also postulates that error checking and correction is not necessary or performed in the application, to avoid the overhead of such processing at the network interface level. It is also compatible with packet broadcasts and multicasting.