Choosing Between COTS and CLTS

The application developer must decide which type of protocol works best for the particular application. Some questions to ask are:

• How reliable must the connection be?

• Must the data arrive in the same order as it was sent?

• Must it be able to handle duplicate data packets?

• Must it have flow control?

• Must it acknowledge the messages it receives?

• What kind of service can the application live with?

• What level of performance is required?

If reliability is paramount, then connection-oriented transport services (COTS) is better.