User Datagram Protocol

A communications protocol that, like TCP, runs on top of IP networks. Unlike TCP/IP, UDP/IP provides very few error recovery services, offering instead a direct way to send and receive datagrams over an IP network. It's used primarily for broadcasting messages over a network. UDP uses the Internet Protocol to get a datagram from one computer to another but does not divide a message into packets (datagrams) and reassemble it at the other end. Specifically, UDP doesn't provide sequencing of the packets that the data arrives in.

A connectionless Internet protocol that is designed for network efficiency and speed at the expense of reliability Scope Note: A data request by the client is served by sending packets without testing to verify whether they actually arrive at the destination, not whether they were corrupted in transit. It is up to the application to determine these factors and request retransmissions.