This has two primary advantages:

• Lower overhead due to the lack of a pre-established session requirement
• Faster data transmission since no acknowledgement of the data transmission is required

UDP is not without its downside. Since it is connectionless and does not support acknowlegements it may be less reliable. Since the sender never receives an acknowledgement the sender never knows if the data is received at the other end.

The TrackMyRide servers use UDP instead of TCP since the data clients are sending is not critical or time-sensitive. If a packet gets lost between the client and the server it isn't the end of the world. The client will eventually (sometimes a little as 30 seconds later) send another packet.