QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) -- A Quick Study

TL;DR

This paper provides an overview of transport protocols, focusing on the differences between connection-oriented and connectionless types, exemplified by TCP and UDP, and discusses their mechanisms and use cases.

Contribution

It offers a concise comparison of TCP and UDP, highlighting their mechanisms, advantages, and typical applications in network communication.

Findings

TCP provides reliable, connection-oriented communication.

UDP offers lightweight, connectionless datagram delivery.

Transport protocols are essential for end-to-end data transfer.

Abstract

Main responsibility of a transport protocol is to support communication between two end-to-end entities. These entities can be hosts or devices, such as routers, firewalls etc. Transport protocol provides mechanism to have a virtually circuited route between these two end-to-end devices. Transport protocol are of two types: Connection oriented and connection-less. As these name suggest, connection oriented requires additional work of setting up connections and provide reliability in terms of packet reordering, congestion control, reliable delivery of packets. On the other hand connectionless transport protocol adapts, sends and forgets mechanism. Its entire purpose is to deliver the datagram without having to worry about its delivery. There are two major protocols, TCP and UDP, used for connection oriented and connection-less services respectively. Being a connection oriented protocol, TCP provides a reliable end-to-end connection and have congestion control mechanisms to avoid buffer overflow at the receiver side.