Which description matches the UDP protocol?

• A. TCP
• B. UDP
• C. ICMP
• D. ARP

Answer: (B)

UDP is a lightweight, connectionless transport protocol that sends messages called datagrams without establishing a formal connection. It uses a small header (source port, destination port, length, and checksum) and offers no guarantee of delivery, no ordering, and no retransmission. This low overhead makes UDP fast and suitable for time-sensitive or streaming applications where some loss is acceptable, such as DNS queries, real-time media, or online gaming. In contrast, TCP is connection-oriented and provides reliability, ordering, and flow/congestion control; ICMP is used for network diagnostics and error reporting rather than delivering application data; and ARP maps IP addresses to MAC addresses on the local network. So the option describing a simple, best-effort datagram service without reliability matches UDP.