Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) is a communications protocol that provides security for datagram-based applications by allowing them to communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery.
The DTLS protocol is based on the stream-oriented Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol and is intended to provide similar security guarantees.
The DTLS protocol datagram preserves the semantics of the underlying transport—the application does not suffer from the delays associated with stream protocols, but because it uses UDP, the application has to deal with packet reordering, loss of datagram and data larger than the size of a datagram network packet.
Because DTLS uses UDP rather than TCP, it avoids the “TCP meltdown problem”. when being used to create a VPN tunnel.