The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the

central protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is

one of the two original components of the entire Internet

Protocol Suite, commonly referred to as TCP/ IP. IP

manages the lower-level transmissions from machine to

machine and TCP functions at a higher level, concerned only

with the two end computers.

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the major transport

protocol utilized in IP networks. The TCP protocol exists

on the Transport Layer of the OSI Model. The TCP protocol

is a connection-oriented protocol which provides end-to-end

reliability.

By connection-oriented, we mean that before two network

nodes can communicate using TCP, they must first complete a

handshaking protocol to create a connection. When we say

that TCP provides end-to-end reliability, we mean that TCP

includes mechanisms for error detection and error

correction between the source and the destination.

These properties of TCP are in contrast to UDP, which is

connectionless and unreliable.Higher layer protocols which

utilize TCP include HTTP, SMTP, NNTP, FTP, telnet, SSH,

and LDAP.