Understanding UDP transport and real-time transfer

Real-time transfer of data requires a fast connection speed between both the users. A typical connection needs to take a frame of both—audio and video—and send it to another user between 40 and 60 times per second in order to be considered good quality. Given this constraint, audio and video applications are allowed to miss certain frames of data in order to keep up the speed of the connection. This means that sending the most recent frame of data is more important than making sure that every frame gets to the other side.

A similar effect can already be seen with any video-playing application today. Video games and streaming media players can tolerate losing a few frames of video due to the special properties of the human brain. Our minds try to fill in the missing gaps as we visualize and process a video or game that we are watching. If our goal is to play 30 frames in one second and we miss frame 28, most of the time, the...