Transmission Control Protocol

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Historical origin of this concept

In May 1974 the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) published a paper entitled "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication." The paper's authors, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, described an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet-switching among the nodes.
A central control component of this model was the Transmission Control Program that incorporated both connection-oriented links and datagram services between hosts.

The monolithic Transmission Control Program was later divided into a modular architecture consisting of the Transmission Control Protocol at the connection-oriented layer and the Internet Protocol at the internetworking (datagram) layer.

Introduction
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite (IP), and is so common that the entire suite is often called TCP/IP.
TCP provides reliable, ordered, error-checked delivery of a stream of octets between programs running on computers connected to a local area network, intranet or the public Internet. Web browsers use TCP when they connect to servers on the World Wide Web, and it is used to deliver email and transfer files from one location to another.

 The protocol corresponds to the transport layer of TCP/IP suite.Figure shows the relationship of TCP to the other protocols in the TCP/IP protocol suite. TCP lies between the application layer and the network layer, and serves as the intermediary between the application programs and the network operations.

Salient Features
TCP provides a communication service at an intermediate level between an application program and the Internet Protocol (IP).
That is, when an application program desires to send a large chunk of data across the Internet using IP, instead of breaking the data into IPsized pieces and issuing a series of IP requests, the software can issue a single request to TCP and let TCP handle the IP details. IP works by exchanging pieces of information called packets. A packet is a sequence of octets (bytes) and consists of a header followed by a body. The header describes the packet's source, destination and control information. The body contains the data IP is transmitting.

 Due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, or other unpredictable network behaviour, IP packets can be lost, duplicated, or delivered out of order. TCP detects these problems, requests retransmission of lost data, rearranges out-of-order data, and even helps minimize network congestion to reduce the occurrence of the other problems. Once the TCP receiver has reassembled the sequence of octets originally transmitted, it passes them to the receiving application. Thus, TCP abstracts the application's communication from the underlying networking details. TCP is utilized extensively by many of the Internet's most popular applications, including the World Wide Web (WWW), E-mail, File Transfer Protocol, peer-to-peer file sharing, and some streaming media applications.

 TCP is optimized for accurate delivery rather than timely delivery, and therefore, TCP sometimes incurs relatively long delays (on the order of seconds) while waiting for out-of-order messages or retransmissions of lost messages. It is not particularly suitable for real-time applications such as Voice over IP. For such applications, protocols like the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) running over the User Datagram Protocol(UDP) are usually recommended instead Transmission Control Protocol accepts data from a data stream, divides it into chunks, and adds a TCP header creating a TCP segment. The TCP segment is then encapsulated into an Internet Protocol (IP) datagram, and exchanged with peer

Thank you.