The UDP Standard
UDP is defined in RFC 768, which has been republished as STD 6 (UDP is an Internet Standard protocol). However, RFC 768 contained some vagaries that were clarified in RFC 1122 (Host Network Requirements). As such, UDP implementations need to incorporate both RFC 768 and RFC 1122 in order to work reliably and consistently with other implementations.
RFC 768 states that UDP is a stateless, unreliable transport protocol that does not guarantee delivery. Thus, UDP is meant to provide a low-overhead transport for applications to use when they do not need guaranteed delivery.
RFC 768 also states that the Protocol ID for UDP is 17. When a system receives an IP datagram that is marked as containing Protocol 17, it should pass the contents of the datagram to the local UDP service for further processing.
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