The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Inte

rnet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in whic

h it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is com
monly referred to as TCP/IP.Historical origin[edit]
During May 1974, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) pub
lished a paper titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication."[1] 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 b
oth connection-oriented links and datagram services between hosts. The monolithi
c Transmission Control Program was later divided into a modular architecture con
sisting of the Transmission Control Protocol at the connection-oriented layer an
d the Internet Protocol at the internetworking (datagram) layer. The model becam
e known informally as TCP/IP, although formally it was henceforth termed the Int
ernet Protocol Suite.
Network function[edit]
The Transmission Control Protocol provides a communication service at an interme
diate level between an application program and the Internet Protocol. It provide
s host-to-host connectivity at the Transport Layer of the Internet model. An app
lication does not need to know the particular mechanisms for sending data via a
link to another host, such as the required packet fragmentation on the transmiss
ion medium. At the transport layer, the protocol handles all handshaking and tra
nsmission details and just presents an abstraction of the network connection to
the application.
At the lower levels of the protocol stack, due to network congestion, traffic lo
ad balancing, or other unpredictable network behaviour, IP packets may be lost,
duplicated, or delivered out of order. TCP detects these problems, requests re-t
ransmission of lost data, rearranges out-of-order data and even helps minimise n
etwork congestion to reduce the occurrence of the other problems. If the data st
ill remains undelivered, its source is notified of this failure. Once the TCP re
ceiver has reassembled the sequence of octets originally transmitted, it passes
them to the receiving application. Thus, TCP abstracts the application's communi
cation from the underlying networking details.
TCP is used extensively by many applications available by internet, including th
e World Wide Web (WWW), E-mail, File Transfer Protocol, Secure Shell, peer-to-pe
er file sharing and streaming media applications.
TCP is optimised for accurate delivery rather than timely delivery. Therefore TC
P sometimes incurs relatively long delays (on the order of seconds) while waitin
g for out-of-order messages or re-transmissions of lost messages. It is not part
icularly suitable for real-time applications such as Voice over IP. For such app
lications, protocols like the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) operating over
the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are usually recommended instead.[2]
TCP is a reliable stream delivery service which guarantees that all bytes receiv
ed will be identical with bytes sent and in the correct order. Since packet tran
sfer by many networks is not reliable, a technique known as 'positive acknowledg
ement with re-transmission' is used to guarantee reliability of packet transfers
. This fundamental technique requires the receiver to respond with an acknowledg
ement message as it receives the data. The sender keeps a record of each packet
it sends and maintains a timer from when the packet was sent. The sender re-tran
smits a packet if the timer expires before the message has been acknowledged. Th
e timer is needed in case a packet gets lost or corrupted.[2]
While IP handles actual delivery of the data, TCP keeps track of 'segments' - th
e individual units of data transmission that a message is divided into for effic
ient routing through the network. For example, when an HTML file is sent from a

web server, the TCP software layer of that server divides the sequence of file o
ctets into segments and forwards them individually to the IP software layer (Int
ernet Layer). The Internet Layer encapsulates each TCP segment into an IP packet
by adding a header that includes (among other data) the destination IP address.
When the client program on the destination computer receives them, the TCP laye
r (Transport Layer) re-assembles the individual segments and ensures they are co
rrectly ordered and error-free as it streams them to an application.
TCP segment structure[edit]
Transmission Control Protocol accepts data from a data stream, divides it into c
hunks, and adds a TCP header creating a TCP segment. The TCP segment is then enc
apsulated into an Internet Protocol (IP) datagram, and exchanged with peers.[3]
The term TCP packet appears in both informal and formal usage, whereas in more p
recise terminology segment refers to the TCP protocol data unit (PDU), datagram[
4] to the IP PDU, and frame to the data link layer PDU:
Processes transmit data by calling on the TCP and passing buffers of data as arg
uments. The TCP packages the data from these buffers into segments and calls on
the internet module [e.g. IP] to transmit each segment to the destination TCP.[5
]
A TCP segment consists of a segment header and a data section. The TCP header co
ntains 10 mandatory fields, and an optional extension field (Options, pink backg
round in table).
The data section follows the header. Its contents are the payload data carried f
or the application. The length of the data section is not specified in the TCP s
egment header. It can be calculated by subtracting the combined length of the TC
P header and the encapsulating IP header from the total IP datagram length (spec
ified in the IP header)