UDPistunnoilla

UDPistunnoilla is a Finnish term that translates roughly to "UDP on stilts" or "UDP on crutches." It refers to a method of implementing reliable data transfer over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which is inherently unreliable. Since UDP does not guarantee packet delivery, order, or integrity, developers sometimes employ techniques to add these features on top of UDP when a lower-level transport like TCP is not suitable or desirable.

This approach involves building custom mechanisms within the application layer to handle packet sequencing, acknowledgments, retransmissions, and error checking. These custom protocols can offer more fine-grained control over network traffic compared to TCP, which might be advantageous in certain real-time applications like online gaming or streaming services where low latency is paramount. However, implementing these reliability features correctly is complex and can be prone to errors. The term UDPistunnoilla highlights the somewhat makeshift or layered nature of achieving reliability through UDP. It implies that while the goal is reliability, it's being achieved through an add-on rather than a native, built-in mechanism.