TCP vs UDP Error-Checking

Question

I've bounced upon two articles that describe in-depth on how TCP and UDP connections work. However there is some kind of inconsistency. Where one article tells me that UDP does no Error-Checking at all, the other article mentions that UDP Does some sorth of error-checking but no recovery or corrections. I would like to know which of the two is the most correct?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

UDP has optional error detection:

• Optional: UDP supports checksums, which the receiver can use to detect errors. However, the use of checksums is optional.
• Detection: There is no built-in recovery mechanism in UDP. This task is left to the application using UDP.

The Wikipedia articles on TCP and UDP are good starting points for more information. Look at the segment/datagram header formats and see how checksums are handled.