What Transport Protocol ?
As promised in a previous post I am going to talk about the main differences between TCP, UDP, and SCTP. here is a brief description of each:
The TCP
The TCP is an acronym for Transmission Control Protocol. This protocol provides a reliable transmission mechanism. The TCP connection occurs between a TCP client and a TCP server. The Client sends a request to open up a socket with the server, the server replies with an agreement. This handshake enables them to open a full duplex reliable connection. The connection is full duplex because data can flow in both directions. It is also reliable because you are assured that your packet is sent. The client provides the server with a sequence number and the server replies with an acknowledgment number. These numbers are used to make sure sent packets are received and provide the ability of packet switching. In other words data can be transferred using different routes and received not in the order sent. Even though routing is the responsibility of the network layer, this protocol provides the connectivity and error checking…the network layer doesn’t provide with error checking nor is does it provide a reliable delivery service.
UDP
The UDP, or the User Datagram Protocol, is considered to be a connectionless and unreliable service. This protocol doesn’t divide the message, and it is the responsibility of the program to divide up the message. Each message is called a datagram, hence its name. The server sends each datagram independently and it is up for the client to discover if there was an error to request the datagrams to be sent again. This protocol is faster because it doesn’t take into consideration data correction. This is useful in video streaming, take for example Youtube; when streaming a video the datagrams of the video are sent simultaneously and if you, the user, realize that a later part of the video is displayed first no matter how many times you replay the video that would be the sequence of the clip. However if you refresh the page, requesting the page to reload you might fix the problem and receive all the datagrams in the order intended.
SCTP
Stream Control Transmission Protocol is similar to TCP however it includes the ability to send the multiple messages via the same connection. Theoretically the SCTP could replace the TCP; however it is currently only used in applications.