Overview: Transport protocols and ports
Transport protocols and ports identify how applications exchange data and which endpoint receives it.
An IP address reaches a network destination; a port identifies a transport endpoint within that context. TCP and UDP provide different delivery behavior. This group establishes those distinctions before a connection error or a media-rate problem is assigned to the application.
Network ports
A network port selects a transport endpoint within an addressed host, with listener binding and connection context separating services that share an IP address.TCP
TCP supplies an ordered reliable byte stream, recovering missing transport data while leaving message structure, encryption and successful media decoding to higher layers.UDP
UDP carries bounded datagrams without supplying TCP-style ordering or retransmission, allowing each application protocol to define its own response to loss and timing.