UDP Lite

UDP-Lite (Lightweight User Datagram Protocol) is a connectionless protocol that allows a potentially damaged data payload to be delivered to an application rather than being discarded by the receiving station. This is useful as it allows decisions about the integrity of the data to be made in the application layer (application or the codec), where the significance of the bits is understood. UDP-Lite is described in .

==Protocol== UDP-Lite is based on User Datagram Protocol (UDP), but unlike UDP, where either all or none of a packet is protected by a checksum, UDP-Lite allows for partial checksums that only covers part of a datagram (an arbitrary count of octets at the beginning of the packet), and will therefore deliver packets that have been partially corrupted. It is designed for multimedia protocols, such as Voice over IP (VoIP) or streamed video, in which receiving a packet with a damaged payload is better than receiving no packet at all. For conventional UDP and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), a single bit in error will cause a "bad" checksum, meaning that the whole packet must be discarded: in this way, bit errors are "promoted" to entire packet errors even where the damage to the data is trivial. For computing the checksum UDP-Lite uses the same checksum algorithm used for UDP (and TCP).