Which characteristic best describes UDP?

Which characteristic best describes UDP?

• A. Connectionless, no guaranteed delivery
• B. Is stateful and maintains a session
• C. Connection-oriented, guaranteed delivery
• D. Ensures in-order delivery with each packet

Answer: (A)

UDP is a connectionless, best-effort protocol. It sends messages without establishing a session, and there’s no mechanism to guarantee that a datagram will arrive, be delivered in order, or be retransmitted if lost. Because it has no state, handshakes, or reliability features, its overhead is very small and latency is low. This contrasts with TCP, which creates a connection, maintains session state, guarantees delivery, and preserves in-order delivery. So the statement that best describes UDP is that it operates without a connection and does not provide guaranteed delivery. Applications use UDP when speed matters more than perfect reliability, such as real-time communications or simple query-response services.

UDP is a connectionless, best-effort protocol. It sends messages without establishing a session, and there’s no mechanism to guarantee that a datagram will arrive, be delivered in order, or be retransmitted if lost. Because it has no state, handshakes, or reliability features, its overhead is very small and latency is low. This contrasts with TCP, which creates a connection, maintains session state, guarantees delivery, and preserves in-order delivery. So the statement that best describes UDP is that it operates without a connection and does not provide guaranteed delivery. Applications use UDP when speed matters more than perfect reliability, such as real-time communications or simple query-response services.