what is udp in networking

User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a connectionless communication protocol used for transporting packets across networks. It is a part of the Internet Protocol suite and operates on top of the Internet Protocol (IP) to transmit datagrams over a network. UDP is an alternative to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and is primarily used to establish low-latency and loss-tolerating connections between applications on the internet. UDP provides two services not provided by the IP layer: port numbers to help distinguish different user requests and an optional checksum capability to verify that the data arrived intact. UDP is a simple message-oriented transport layer protocol that is documented in RFC 768. Unlike TCP, it is an unreliable and connectionless protocol, so there is no need to establish a connection prior to data transfer. UDP enables process-to-process communication, while TCP supports host-to-host communication. UDP is more efficient in terms of both latency and bandwidth, making it suitable for simple request-response communication when the size of data is less and hence there is lesser concern about flow and error control. UDP is used for some routing update protocols like RIP (Routing Information Protocol) and is normally used for real-time applications that cannot tolerate uneven delays between packets.