Received September 20, 2018, accepted November 16, 2018, date of publication February 7, 2019, date of current version February 20, 2019. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2886707 Keyed User Datagram Protocol: Concepts and Operation of an Almost Reliable Connectionless Transport Protocol NUNO M. GARCIA 1,2, FÁBIO GIL1,3, BÁRBARA MATOS1,4, COULIBALY YAHAYA5, (Member, IEEE), NUNO POMBO1,2, (Member, IEEE), AND ROSSITZA IVANOVA GOLEVA6 1Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade da Beira Interior, 6200-001 Covilhã, Portugal 2Instituto de Telecomunicações, 6200-001 Covilhã, Portugal 3ECATI, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 1749-024 Lisbon, Portugal 4Department of Artificial Intelligence and Systems Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Riga Technical University, LV-1658 R¯ıga, Latvia 5Université de Ségou, Ségou, Mali 6Department of Informatics, New Bulgarian University, 1618 Sofia, Bulgaria Corresponding author: Nuno M. Garcia (
[email protected]) This work was supported by Grant FCT UID/EEA/50008/2013. ABSTRACT Departing from the well-known problem of the excessive overhead and latency of connection oriented protocols, this paper describes a new almost reliable connectionless protocol that uses user datagram protocol (UDP) segment format and is UDP compatible. The problem is presented and described, the motivation, the possible areas of interest and the concept and base operation modes for the protocol named keyed UDP are presented (here called KUDP). Also, discussed are some of the possible manners in which the KUDP can be used, addressing potential problems related with current networking technologies. As UDP is a connectionless protocol, and KUDP allows for some degree of detection of loss and re-ordering of segments received out-of-sequence, we also present a proposal for a stream reconstruction algorithm.