Since the magic packet is only scanned for the string above, and not actually parsed by a full protocol stack, it could be sent as payload of any network- and transport-layer protocol, although it is typically sent as a UDP datagram to port 0 (reserved port number), 7 (Echo Protocol) or 9 (Discard Protocol), or directly over Ethernet as EtherType 0x0842. A connection-oriented transport-layer protocol like TCP is less suited for this task as it requires establishing an active connection before sending user data.