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Difficulty: MediumTCP vs UDP Comparison and Protocols

An engineer captures traffic from an enterprise workstation streaming live voice communication. The capture shows small datagrams arriving without connection establishment frames, sequence numbers, or acknowledgment requests, allowing out-of-order delivery without triggering retransmissions. Which transport protocol is transmitting this traffic, and what is its baseline header size?

  1. UDP, which uses a fixed 8-byte header containing only source port, destination port, length, and checksum fields.Answer
  2. B
    TCP, which uses a reduced 8-byte header when sequencing and acknowledgment options are disabled for real-time media streams.
  3. C
    UDP, which uses a baseline 20-byte header to maintain port addressing while relying on IP for sequencing.
  4. D
    TCP, which uses a fixed 20-byte header but automatically suppresses retransmissions when payload buffers detect UDP-like data.

Answer

UDP, which uses a fixed 8-byte header containing only source port, destination port, length, and checksum fields.
The captured traffic demonstrates connectionless, unreliable delivery suited for real-time voice streaming. User Datagram Protocol (UDP) provides this lightweight transport mechanism using a fixed header of 8 bytes (comprising 2 bytes each for Source Port, Destination Port, Length, and Checksum).

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze packet capture characteristics
Identified connectionless behavior without sequence numbers, ACKs, or handshakes.
Real-time voice traffic prioritizes minimal latency and jitter over reliable delivery.
2
Map operational characteristics to Transport layer protocols
UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is connectionless, whereas TCP is connection-oriented.
UDP does not track sequence numbers or mandate packet retransmission.
3
Determine the exact header size
UDP uses a fixed 8-byte header (Source Port, Destination Port, Length, Checksum), compared to TCP's 20-byte minimum header.
Lower header overhead reduces bandwidth consumption and processing overhead for small real-time datagrams.

Key Concept

TCP vs UDP Header Overhead and Protocol Mechanics
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Topics

TCP vs UDP Comparison and Protocols

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