What term describes data packets sent to a recipient without waiting for acknowledgment?

The correct answer is datagrams. In networking, datagrams are packets of data that are sent without establishing a prior connection or waiting for an acknowledgment from the recipient. This is characteristic of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which allows for faster transmission by not requiring a handshake process like Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) does.

When a datagram is sent, the sender does not wait to confirm that it has been received by the recipient, which can be advantageous in scenarios where speed is more critical than reliability, such as video streaming or online gaming.

On the other hand, frames typically refer to data packets at the data link layer, often associated with Ethernet frames, which include more overhead for handling error detection and control. Segments are associated with TCP and represent a part of data that is sent after establishing a connection, requiring acknowledgment between sender and receiver. Packets is a more generic term used to describe units of data at various layers of the OSI model, but does not specifically denote the unacknowledged nature of the transmission like datagrams do.