Question

What are the two transport protocols offered by the Internet and what are their main characteristics?

Answer 1

The two main protocols offered by the internet:

1.Transmission Control Protocol(TCP)

2.User Datagram Protocol(UDP)

Main Characteristics of TCP:

i. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol. Connection-orientation means that the communicating devices should establish a connection before transmitting data and should close the connection after transmitting the data.

ii. TCP is reliable as it guarantees delivery of data to the destination router.

iii. TCP provides extensive error checking mechanisms. It is because it provides flow control and acknowledgment of data.

iv. Retransmission of lost packets is possible in TCP, but not in UDP.Sequencing of data is a feature of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). this means that packets arrive in-order at the receiver.

v. TCP is comparatively slower than UDP.

vi. Retransmission of lost packets is possible in TCP, but not in UDP.

vii. TCP has a (20-80) bytes variable length header.

viii. TCP is heavy-weight.

xi. TCP doesn’t supports Broadcasting.

x. UDP is used by DNS, DHCP, TFTP, SNMP, RIP, and VoIP.

Main Characteristics of UDP:

i. UDP is the Datagram oriented protocol. This is because there is no overhead for opening a connection, maintaining a connection, and terminating a connection. UDP is efficient for broadcast and multicast type of network transmission.

ii.The delivery of data to the destination cannot be guaranteed in UDP.

iii. UDP has only the basic error checking mechanism using checksums.

iv.There is no sequencing of data in UDP. If ordering is required, it has to be managed by the application layer.

v. UDP is faster, simpler and more efficient than TCP.

vi.There is no retransmission of lost packets in User Datagram Protocol (UDP).

vii. UDP has a 8 bytes fixed length header.

viii. UDP is lightweight.

xi. UDP supports Broadcasting.