UDP-based Data Transfer Protocol, also known as UDT, is a high performance data transfer protocol designed for transferring large volumetric datasets over high speed wide area networks, where TCP does not work very well. UDT is built on top of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) by adding new congestion control and reliability control mechanisms. UDT is an application level, connection oriented, duplex protocol, while it supports both reliable data streaming and partial reliable messaging. UDT was designed to deliver bulk data over wide area high speed networks and it has realized the goal well. For example, using the UDT protocol, scientist was able to transfer astronomy dataset at 8Gb/s from Chicago, IL to Tampa, FL. The protocol has been used in many research projects and commercial products for high speed data transfer. Recent versions of the protocol have been updated to support commodity Internet as well. In particular, the protocol now supports rendezvous connection setup, which is a desirable feature to traverse NAT firewall using UDP. UDT was developed by Yunhong Gu during his PhD study at the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) of University of Illinois at Chicago. The protocol has an open source implementation on SourceForge.
