An organization has written an application that allows all of their employees to

Question

An organization has written an application that allows all of their employees to send messages instantly or to an inbox to other employees. The application was written to use the UDP transport protocol, and works well most of the time. However, some employees complain about several issues. Sometimes messages do not make it to the recipient and no one is notified. Some messages arrive with some of the original text missing, or with some text corrupted with garbage characters. In rare cases, long messages arrive with out-of-order text where what was typed at the end actually appears at the beginning of the message, or vice-versa. The project manager is considering what could be done to remedy these issues. He suspects switching to TCP could help, but is not entirely sure. Answer the following questions to help the project manager decide.

a. Why might the application exhibit the issues the employees complain about?

b. What could be done by the application to correct these issues without switching to TCP?

c. How might switch to the TCP protocol solve these issues without requiring the changes in part b?

d. Other than items mentioned in item c, what would be the advantages of switching to the TCP protocol?

e. What would be the disadvantages of switching to the TCP protocol?

Explanation / Answer

Answer a) The reason behind those issues is the use of UDP. As UDP is a connectionless protocol therefore it doesn't guarantee that the packets which are sent may reach the receiver or not or if reached than it may be in proper order or not.

Answer b) The changes in the application layer can be made because this layer basically manages the ordering of the packets sent. Than there are more chances of receiving the messages in the same order as they were sent.

Answer c) The TCP checks for the errors and try to recover those errors by retransmitting the same packets again from the sender's side whereas UPD simply discards errorneous packets. Thus the use of TCP will lead to no data loss and confirms the receiving of the message at the receiver end.

Answer d) TCP is highly reliable and makes use of the various routing algorithms for the proper transmission of the packets. It waits for the acknowledgement as well. TCP can hadle congestion situations.

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