UDP-BASED DATA

TRANSFER PROTOCOL
(UDT)

By:

Cecil S. Briones

UDP-BASED DATA
TRANSFER PROTOCOL
(UDT)
is a high performance data
transfer protocol designed for
transferring large volumetric
datasets over high speed wide
area networks.

UDT
Initial versions were developed and tested on
very high speed networks (1Gb/s, 10Gb/s, etc.);
however, recent versions of the protocol have been
updated to support the commodity Internet as
well. For example, the protocol now supports
rendezvous connection setup, which is a desirable
feature for traversing NAT firewalls using UDP.
has an open source implementation which can be
found on SourceForge. It is one of the most
popular solutions for supporting high speed data
transfer and is part of many research projects
and commercial products.

USER DATAGRAM PROTOCOL

(UDP)

is one of the core members of the

Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network
protocols used for the Internet. With UDP,
computer applications can send messages, in this
case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on
an Internet Protocol (IP) network without
requiring prior communications to set up special
transmission channels or data paths. The
protocol was designed by David P. Reed in 1980
and formally defined in RFC 768.

BACKGROUND

UDT was developed by Yunhong Gu during his PhD studies

at the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) of
University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Gu continues to
maintain and improve the protocol after graduation.
The UDT project started in 2001, when inexpensive optical
networks became popular and triggered a wider awareness
of TCP efficiency problems over wide area high speed
networks. The first version of UDT, also known as SABUL
(Simple Available Bandwidth Utility Library), was designed
to support bulk data transfer for scientific data movement
over private networks. SABUL used UDP for data transfer
and a separate TCP connection for control messages.
SABUL was later renamed to UDT starting with version
2.0, which was released in 2004. UDT2 removed the TCP
control connection in SABUL and used UDP for both data
and control information. UDT2 also introduced a new
congestion control algorithm that allowed the protocol to
run "fairly and friendly" with concurrent UDT and TCP
flows.

UDT3 (2006)

extended the usage of the protocol to the

commodity Internet. Congestion control was
tuned to support relatively low bandwidth as
well. UDT3 also significantly reduced the use of
system resources (CPU and memory).
Additionally, UDT3 allows users to easily define
and install their own congestion control
algorithms.

UDT4 (2007)

introduced several new features to better support high

concurrency and firewall traversing. UDT4 allowed
multiple UDT connections to bind to the same UDP port
and it also supported rendezvous connection setup for
easier UDP hole punching.

A fifth version of the protocol is currently in the planning

stage. Possible features include the ability to support
multiple independent sessions over a single connection.

Moreover, since the absence of a security feature for UDT has

been an issue with its initial implementation in a
commercial environment, Bernardo (2011) has developed a
security architecture for UDT as part of his PhD studies.
This architecture however is undergoing enhancement to
support UDT in various network environments (i.e., optical
networks).

PROTOCOL ARCHITECTURE
UDT is built on top of User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
by adding congestion control and reliability control
mechanisms. UDT is an application level,
connection oriented, duplex protocol that supports
both reliable data streaming and partial reliable
messaging.
Acknowledging
AIMD with Decreasing Increase
Configurable Congestion Control
Rendezvous Connection Setup

ACKNOWLEDGING

UDT uses periodic acknowledgments (ACK) to

confirm packet delivery, while negative ACKs
(loss reports) are used to report packet loss.
Periodic ACKs help to reduce control traffic on
the reverse path when the data transfer speed is
high, because in these situations, the number of
ACKs is proportional to time, rather than the
number of data packets.

AIMD WITH DECREASING

INCREASE

UDT uses an AIMD (additive increase multiplicative

decrease) style congestion control algorithm. The
increase parameter is inversely proportional to the
available bandwidth (estimated using the packet pair
technique), thus UDT can probe high bandwidth
rapidly and can slow down for better stability when it
approaches maximum bandwidth. The decrease factor
is a random number between 1/8 and 1/2. This helps
reduce the negative impact of loss synchronization.
In UDT, packet transmission is limited by both rate
control and window control. The sending rate is
updated by the AIMD algorithm described above. The
congestion window, as a secondary control
mechanism, is set according to the data arrival rate
on the receiver side.

CONFIGURABLE CONGESTION
CONTROL

The UDT implementation exposes a set of

variables related to congestion control in a C++
class and allows users to define a set of callback
functions to manipulate these variables. Thus,
users can redefine the control algorithm by
overriding some or all of these callback functions.
Most TCP control algorithms can be implemented
using this feature with fewer than 100 lines of
code.

RENDEZVOUS CONNECTION
SETUP

UDT supports both traditional client/server

connection setup mode and a new rendezvous
connection setup mode. The latter is widely used
for firewall traversing when both peers are
behind firewalls.

USE SCENARIOS
UDT is widely used in high performance
computing area to support high speed data
transfer over optical networks. For example,
GridFTP, a popular data transfer tool in grid
computing, uses UDT as its data transfer
protocol.
Over the commodity Internet, UDT has been used
in many commercial products for fast file transfer
over wide area networks.
Because UDT is purely based on UDP, it has also
been used in many situations where TCP is at a
disadvantage to UDP. These scenarios include
Peer-to-Peer applications, video/audio
communication and many others.

THATS ALL FOLKS

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