When should the UDP protocol be used?

UDP should be used when:

• Speed takes precedence over reliability: For example, in streaming video, online gaming, or VoIP, where a small data loss is less critical than latency.
• No delivery acknowledgment is required: Applications that send data without needing to know if it was received (e.g., telemetry monitoring).
• Broadcast or multicast is needed: UDP easily supports sending data to multiple recipients simultaneously.
• Application manages reliability itself: Some applications implement their own error checking and retransmission mechanisms on top of UDP.
• Avoid TCP overhead: Establishing a connection and managing streams in TCP add latency, which may be unacceptable for some scenarios.