Difference between TCP and UDP | Compare TCP and UDP

 

Introduction

There are two transport layer protocols: TCP and UDP. TCP – Transmission control Protocol and UDP – User Datagram Protocol. In this post, we will discuss difference between TCP and UDP.

Overview of TCP

There are two transport layer protocols: TCP and UDP. TCP – Transmission control Protocol and UDP – User Datagram Protocol. In this post, we will discuss about TCP.

TCP provides a connection-oriented. TCP provides process to process communication through the port number. TCP provides reliable services; it means sender can know that each packet reached at destination through the acknowledgement from receiver. TCP provides flow control, error control and congestion control. TCP does not support multicasting and broadcasting. It supports unicasting. The unit of information passed by TCP to IP is called segment. TCP maintains a checksum on its header and data. TCP must discard duplicate data. When TCP transmits data between sender and receiver, it performs 3 phases. Which is as follow.

Connection Establishment – TCP uses 3-way handshaking technique to established a connection between sender and receiver. This phase involves SYN, ACK and Window size.

Data Transfer – In this phase, sender sends a data to destination.

Connection Termination – When all the data transferred from sender to receiver, then sender sends FIN packet to receiver to terminate the connection.

Need of TCP:

TCP is used when transfer small amount data in secure manner. TCP protocol assurances the integrity of data sent across the network. High-level protocols that need to transmit data all use TCP protocol.

Overview of UDP

UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol. UDP is a simple, datagram-oriented transport layer protocol. UDP has been designed to transfer data packet over internet. UDP is connectionless protocol provides no reliability or flow control mechanisms. It also has no error recovery procedures. Several application layer’s protocols such as TFTP and the RPC use UDP. UDP makes use of the port concept to direct datagrams to the proper upper-layer applications.  UDP serves as a simple application interface to the IP.

Need of UDP:

TCP proves to be an overhead for certain kinds of applications. The Connection Establishment Phase, Connection Termination Phase etc of TCP are time consuming. To avoid this overhead, certain applications which require fast speed and less overhead use UDP. UDP is used, where acknowledgement uses significant bandwidth along with original data packet.

Difference between TCP and UDP

No.	TCP	UDP
1	TCP is connection oriented.	UDP is connectionless.
2	TCP connection is byte stream.	UDP connection is message stream.
3	TCP does not support multicasting and broadcasting.	UDP supports broadcasting.
4	It provides error control and flow control.	It does not provide flow control and error control.
5	TCP supports full duplex transmission.	UDP does not support full duplex transmission.
6	TCP is reliable.	UDP is unreliable.
7	TCP packet is called segment.	UDP packet is called user datagram.