THE ROLE OF CONNECTION-ORIENTED AND CONNECTION-LESS SERVICES

The Role of Connection-Oriented and Connection-Less Services

Agus. Ramadona

University of the People

Note

Agus Ramadona, Departement of Computer Science, University of The People

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Agus Ramadona, Departement of

Computer Science, University of The People, 225 S Lake Ave Suite 300, Pasadena, CA 91101,

USA

Contact: agusramadona@gmail.com
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Abstract

This paper was made to explain 2 types of communication services in the network namely

Connection-oriented and Connection-less protocol. These two types of communication services

each have their advantages and disadvantages, but placing their use appropriately is the most

important thing.

Keywords: Connection-Oriented, Connection-less, TCP, UDP, protocol

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The Role Of Connection-Oriented And Connection-Less Services

On a computer network today, communication between computers can be done by using a

protocol provision that is used uniformly by each of these computers. These protocols basically

provide 2 types of communication services that can be used, namely: Connection-oriented and

connection-less (Chaudhari, 2018).

Before deciding which communication services should be used in real applications, it is

better to know the structure of each type of communication so that it can determine its

characteristics and choose the type of communication service that suits the requirement.

I. Characteristics of Connection-oriented and Connection-less Communication Services

Basically, a communication occurs started with the "Request" and then returned with

"Response". This is also the same in computer network communication, but at the stage of more

detail mechanism the communication is divided into 2 types of communication services, namely:

Connection-oriented and Connection-less. These 2 types of services are layers that are below the

internetwork layer (known as IP) (Frystyk, 1994). Internet Protocol (IP) itself is a type of

communication service that is classified as a connectionless delivery system. But because the IP

layer is very dependent on the physical layer, as long as there are no errors in the physical device,

the IP protocol will guarantee to transmit the packet to the destination. The layer can be described

as follows:
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Figure.001 (Frystyk, 1994)

II. Connection-oriented Communication Characteristics

In a computer network, the commonly known Connection-oriented communication service

is TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). This type of communication protocol is a reliable type of

communication because it is a controlled communication mechanism where a packet sent using

TCP can be recovered when there is damage, loss, duplication, etc. during transmission, but of

course, the control features possessed along with the size of the packet header resulted by TCP.

Each packet byte transmitted by TCP has a sequence number (SEQUENCE) and requires an

answer in the form of a positive acknowledgment (ACK) from the host that receives it. If at certain

intervals the ACK status is not received then the data will be transmitted again. While on the

receiving side "sequence number" is a reference used to reconstruct received data in the order and

avoid duplication (Frystyk, 1994). This can be seen in the following picture:
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Figure.002 (Frystyk, 1994)

The main thing about Connection-oriented using TCP is that communication occurs with a

"Handshake", known as a 3-way handshake (Frystyk, 1994). This can be seen from the following

picture:

Figure.003 (Frystyk, 1994)

From the description above, we can conclude some of the characteristics of the connection type of

TCP as follows (Shekhar, 2017):

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Advantages and Disadvantages of TCP:

1. Required configuration and conditioning so that communication using TCP can occur

between hosts.

2. TCP connections can guarantee the reliability of services with the data recovery features.

3. Reducing congestion effects because when a packet is sent has been received,

communication will be terminated immediately.

4. Controlled connections such as TCP are very suitable for data communication with very

long distances to ensure perfect data reception.

5. When a packet is received from an interface, it will be replied via the interface when the

packet is received.

6. Requires considerable resource allocation such as processor and memory on network

devices (store and forward procedure).

7. The transfer speed is slower due to the process of initializing communication and sending

and receiving the transmission status like ACK message.

III. Connection-less Communication Characteristics

In a computer network, the Connection-less type of communication like UDP (User

Datagram Protocol) protocol. The UDP protocol has a very streamlined data header due to the

absence of features like TCP. But things on the other side of data communication using the UDP

protocol are data communications that do not have reliability because the information that is held

in the UDP packet header is only the sender and destination address without any complex control

features. This can be seen in the following picture:

THE ROLE OF CONNECTION-ORIENTED AND CONNECTION-LESS SERVICES 7

Figure.004 (Frystyk, 1994)

The UDP protocol is a basic protocol used in client-server applications but has low reliability

because there is no guarantee of data reception completeness on the receiving host, as well as the

absence of recovery features when there is damage, loss or other data defects when the

transmission is carried out (Frystyk, 1994).

The characteristics of the types of UDP connections include the following:

UDP advantages and disadvantages:

1. Complex preparations and configurations are not needed such as TCP.

2. There is no guarantee of reliability because there is no recovery features.

3. Being one of the factors in the occurrence of congestion effects due to no immediate

termination of packet delivery as in TCP.

4. It is suitable for short distance communication that accommodates burst-data transmission

types such as video, audio.

5. When a packet is received from an interface, it will be replied to all existing interfaces.

6. Does not require a large resource allocation on network devices because there is no

complex store process effort as TCP.

7. Faster transfer speed because there is no initialization process and a slimmer packet header

size.
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IV. Preference for Communication Protocol Selection

By analyzing the characteristics of each communication protocol above, for the sake of

communication with geographic coverage that has a long distance, the first thing needs to be

determined are:

a. Types of data to be transmitted (textual, video, voice).

b. See the urgency of the data to be transmitted (whether to be used again, or data that is

disposable but is "time-sensitive" data such as telephone voice transmission, and video

conference calls) with a small delay tolerance.

c. The distance that occurs when data transmission is carried out.

I will use the TCP (Connection-oriented) communication protocol for textual data types, and for

data that requires reservations (stored for future needs) and not "time-sensitive" data such as voice-

call or video-conference. For long distances, it would be better to still use TCP because then I can

create communication relays to ensure perfect data reception.

Using the UDP (Connection-less) communication protocol is quite appropriate if the type of data

transmitted is in the form of voice-call or video-conference data, and not data that requires a

reservation (stored) but transmitted data is data that has no tolerance for latency/delay and also in

a short distance.
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References:

Frystyk, H. (1994). The Internet Protocol Stack.

Retrieved from: https://www.w3.org/People/Frystyk/thesis/TcpIp.html

Shekhar, A. (2017). Connection-Oriented Vs Connection-Less Service: Differences And Working

Functionalities.

Retrieved from: https://fossbytes.com/connection-oriented-vs-connection-less-

connection/

Chaudari, A. (2018). 9 Difference between Connection-Oriented and Connectionless Services

Protocol.

Retrieved from: https://www.csestack.org/difference-connection-oriented-

connectionless-services-protocol/