To
better answer this question we need to understand the working of TCP and UDP
individually. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is a communication protocol
on the internet, which routes packets between machines in a best effort
fashion. It creates a protocol that guarantees or assures the sender that the
packets or in broader view a message will be received by the specified
receiver. TCP does this by a process called as TCP sessions. It has three basic
components, namely,
1.
Initial
SYN request (Handshake)
2.
Reception
of SYN-ACK request
3.
Acknowledgement
response
This
process is also accompanied by sequence numbers that ensure that the packets
are received in order and also used to check for completeness of messages.
On
the other hand, UDP (User Datagram Protocol) does not have a lot of features as
the TCP has. UDP does not make a guarantee that the packets or messages will be
received in order and also does not check for correctness or completeness. It
also does not have initial handshake as TCP has.
As
we can infer from the above descriptions, TCP takes longer time than UDP does.
Also in TCP if we are transmitting voice or audio and due to some issue a
packet is lost. The receiver would stop accepting any more packets until the
missing packets is received which will add latency to the communication and
hence will disturb a real time communication. Whereas for the UDP based audio
or video communication, even if a packet is lost, we humans are able to fill in
the void by pattern recognition or by anticipating the voice and hence
communication can occur. Even though there maybe packet loss in UDP
communication, it is a more efficient and effective protocol for time-sensitive
applications such as voice and audio.
