UDP is a simple message-oriented transport layer protocol that is documented in RFC 768. Although UDP provides integrity verification (via checksum) of the header and payload,4 it provides no guarantees to the upper layer protocol for message delivery and the UDP layer retains no state of UDP messages once sent. For this reason, UDP sometimes is referred to as Unreliable Datagram Protocol.5 If transmission reliability is desired, it must be implemented in the user's application.
A number of UDP's attributes make it especially suited for certain applications.
Applications can use datagram sockets to establish host-to-host communications. An application binds a socket to its endpoint of data transmission, which is a combination of an IP address and a port. In this way, UDP provides application multiplexing. A port is a software structure that is identified by the port number, a 16-bit integer value, allowing for port numbers between 0 and 65535. Port 0 is reserved but is a permissible source port value if the sending process does not expect messages in response.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has divided port numbers into three ranges.6 Port numbers 0 through 1023 are used for common, well-known services. On Unix-like operating systems, using one of these ports requires superuser operating permission. Port numbers 1024 through 49151 are the registered ports used for IANA-registered services. Ports 49152 through 65535 are dynamic ports that are not officially designated for any specific service and may be used for any purpose. These may also be used as ephemeral ports, which software running on the host may use to dynamically create communications endpoints as needed.7
A UDP datagram consists of a datagram header followed by a data section (the payload data for the application). The UDP datagram header consists of 4 fields, each of which is 2 bytes (16 bits):8
The use of the Checksum and Source Port fields is optional in IPv4 (light purple background in table). In IPv6 only the Source Port field is optional. If not used, these fields should be set to zero.10
The method used to compute the checksum is defined in RFC 768, and efficient calculation is discussed in RFC 1071:
Checksum is the 16-bit ones' complement of the ones' complement sum of a pseudo header of information from the IP header, the UDP header, and the data, padded with zero octets at the end (if necessary) to make a multiple of two octets.16
In other words, all 16-bit words are summed using ones' complement arithmetic. Add the 16-bit values up. On each addition, if a carry-out (17th bit) is produced, swing that 17th carry bit around and add it to the least significant bit of the running total.17 Finally, the sum is then ones' complemented to yield the value of the UDP checksum field.
If the checksum calculation results in the value zero (all 16 bits 0) it should be sent as the ones' complement (all 1s) as a zero-value checksum indicates no checksum has been calculated.18 In this case, any specific processing is not required at the receiver, because all 0s and all 1s are equal to zero in 1's complement arithmetic.
The differences between IPv4 and IPv6 are in the pseudo header used to compute the checksum, and that the checksum is not optional in IPv6.19 Under specific conditions, a UDP application using IPv6 is allowed to use a zero UDP zero-checksum mode with a tunnel protocol.20
When UDP runs over IPv4, the checksum is computed using a pseudo header that contains some of the same information from the real IPv4 header.21: 2 The pseudo header is not the real IPv4 header used to send an IP packet, it is used only for the checksum calculation. UDP checksum computation is optional for IPv4. If a checksum is not used it should be set to the value zero.
The checksum is calculated over the following fields:
As IPv6 has larger addresses and a different header layout, the method used to compute the checksum is changed accordingly:22: §8.1
Any transport or other upper-layer protocol that includes the addresses from the IP header in its checksum computation must be modified for use over IPv6, to include the 128-bit IPv6 addresses instead of 32-bit IPv4 addresses.
When computing the checksum, again a pseudo header is used that mimics the real IPv6 header:
The checksum is computed over the following fields:
Lacking reliability, UDP applications may encounter some packet loss, reordering, errors or duplication. If using UDP, the end-user applications must provide any necessary handshaking such as real-time confirmation that the message has been received. Applications, such as TFTP, may add rudimentary reliability mechanisms into the application layer as needed.23 If an application requires a high degree of reliability, a protocol such as the Transmission Control Protocol may be used instead.
Most often, UDP applications do not employ reliability mechanisms and may even be hindered by them. Streaming media, real-time multiplayer games and voice over IP (VoIP) are examples of applications that often use UDP. In these particular applications, loss of packets is not usually a fatal problem. In VoIP, for example, latency and jitter are the primary concerns. The use of TCP would cause jitter if any packets were lost as TCP does not provide subsequent data to the application while it is requesting a re-send of the missing data.
Numerous key Internet applications use UDP, including: the Domain Name System (DNS), the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), the Routing Information Protocol (RIP)24 and the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).
Voice and video traffic is generally transmitted using UDP. Real-time video and audio streaming protocols are designed to handle occasional lost packets, so only slight degradation in quality occurs, rather than large delays if lost packets were retransmitted. Because both TCP and UDP run over the same network, in the mid-2000s a few businesses found that an increase in UDP traffic from these real-time applications slightly hindered the performance of applications using TCP such as point of sale, accounting, and database systems (when TCP detects packet loss, it will throttle back its data rate usage).25
Some VPN systems such as OpenVPN may use UDP and perform error checking at the application level while implementing reliable connections. WireGuard uses UDP and performs error checking, but does not provide any reliability guarantees, leaving it for the encapsulated protocols to deal with.
QUIC is a transport protocol built on top of UDP. QUIC provides a reliable and secure connection. HTTP/3 uses QUIC as opposed to earlier versions of HTTPS which use a combination of TCP and TLS to ensure reliability and security respectively. This means that HTTP/3 uses a single handshake to set up a connection, rather than having two separate handshakes for TCP and TLS, meaning the overall time to establish a connection is reduced.26
See also: Transport layer
Transmission Control Protocol is a connection-oriented protocol and requires handshaking to set up end-to-end communications. Once a connection is set up, user data may be sent bi-directionally over the connection.
User Datagram Protocol is a simpler message-based connectionless protocol. Connectionless protocols do not set up a dedicated end-to-end connection. Communication is achieved by transmitting information in one direction from source to destination without verifying the readiness or state of the receiver.
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J. Postel, ed. (28 August 1980). User Datagram Protocol. IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC0768. STD 6. RFC 768. Internet Standard 6. /wiki/Jon_Postel ↩
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D. Borman; S. Deering; R. Hinden (August 1999). IPv6 Jumbograms. Network Working Group. doi:10.17487/RFC2675. RFC 2675. Proposed Standard. Obsoletes RFC 2147. /wiki/Steve_Deering ↩
S. Deering; R. Hinden (July 2017). Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification. Internet Engineering Task Force. doi:10.17487/RFC8200. STD 86. RFC 8200. Internet Standard 86. Obsoletes RFC 2460. /wiki/Steve_Deering ↩
"Compute 16-bit Ones' Complement Sum". mathforum.org. John. 20 March 2002. Archived from the original (email) on 17 November 2020. Retrieved 5 November 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20201117162031/http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/54379.html ↩
Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification. p. 27-28. doi:10.17487/RFC8200. RFC 8200. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8200#page-27-28 ↩
Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification. p. 23. doi:10.17487/RFC8085. RFC 8085. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8085#page-23 ↩
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