An alternative to using TCP/IP was to send the control messages as UDP packets. Since it is inherently faster to send a UDP packet (in terms of opening a socket and transmitting), this resulted in faster connection establishment times. Unfortunately, UDP is unreliable in terms of data delivery. Also, in the current implementation of the protocol, the underlying data link layer is the Myrinet layer. This being an unreliable medium too, there is a potential for high packet loss. Thus UDP, although being a faster protocol for communication, could not be used directly to implement the protocol. In order to improve the performance of UDP, a Retransmit mechanism was adopted. This meant that the daemons acknowledged the reception of a UDP packet via an Ack message. Employing a timer and resending the original control packet on time-out, ensured that the UDP packet was indeed delivered to the destination host. Dual reception of a packet was avoided by checking the sequence number of the received packet with the one in the earlier packet.