An organization has written an application that allows all of their employees to send messages instantly or to an inbox to other employees. The application was written to use the UDP transport protocol, and works well most of the time. However, some employees complain about several issues. Sometimes messages do not make it to the recipient and no one is notified. Some messages arrive with some of the original text missing, or with some text corrupted with garbage characters. In rare cases, long messages arrive with out-of-order text where what was typed at the end actually appears at the beginning of the message, or vice-versa.
The project manager is considering what could be done to remedy these issues. He suspects switching to TCP could help, but is not entirely sure. Answer the following questions to help the project manager decide.
a. Why might the application exhibit the issues the employees complain about?
b. What could be done by the application to correct these issues without switching to TCP?
c. How might switching to the TCP protocol solve these issues without requiring the changes in part b?
d. Other than items mentioned in item c, what would be the advantages of switching to the TCP protocol?
e. What would be the disadvantages of switching to the TCP protocol?