User Datagram Protocol

Sometimes an application on a network needs to send messages to a specific application or process on another network. The UDP provides a datagram means of communication between applications on Internet hosts.

Because senders do not know which processes are active at any given moment, UDP uses destination protocol ports (or abstract destination points within a machine), identified by positive integers, to send messages to one of multiple destinations on a host. The protocol ports receive and hold messages in queues until applications on the receiving network can retrieve them.

Because UDP relies on the underlying IP to send its datagrams, UDP provides the same connectionless message delivery as IP. It offers no assurance of datagram delivery or duplication protection. However, UDP does allow the sender to specify source and destination port numbers for the message and calculates a checksum of both the data and header. These two features allow the sending and receiving applications to ensure the correct delivery of a message.

This illustration shows the first 32 bits of the UDP packet header. The first 16 bits contain the source port number and the length. The second 16 bits contain the destination port number and the checksum.

Applications that require reliable delivery of datagrams must implement their own reliability checks when using UDP. Applications that require reliable delivery of streams of data should use TCP.

UDP Header Field Definitions

The applications programming interface (API) to UDP is a set of library subroutines provided by the sockets interface.