What Is The Transmission Control Protocol?

Date First Published: 16th February 2022

Topic: Computer Networking

Subtopic: Internet Protocols

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 7/10

Learn more about what the Transmission Control Protocol is in this article.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a network communication protocol that is designed to send data packets over the internet and establish remote connections between computers by ensuring the delivery of messages over supporting networks and the internet. It is one of the main protocols of the internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) and it originated in the original network implementation where it provided additional features to the Internet Protocol (IP).

TCP transmits data between multiple applications and network device. Reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of bits are provided by TCP. Most popular internet services and applications, including email, the World Wide Web, and file sharing use TCP to transmit data.

Steps Of TCP

The steps of the use of TCP when a user requests a webpage from the internet is:

• The request is processed by the server and the HTML webpage is sent back to that user.
• The HTTP protocol requests the TCP later in order to set the required connection and send the HTML file.
• The data is broken down into small packets and forwarded to the Internet Protocol layer.
• The TCP layer waits for the transmission to be completed and acknowledges once all of the packets have been received.

Reliability

TCP is known to be a reliable protocol, since it provides an error-checking and recovery protocol, flow control, it ensures that the data reaches its proper final destination that it was sent from, and it assigns an IP address to each computer that is on the network. However, TCP can become an issue for small networks with low resources because it is designed for WANs. This means that it lacks flexibility and cannot work with any protocol suite other than the TCP/IP protocol. For example, it cannot work with a Bluetooth connection.

In digital network communications, TCP is most commonly used. TCP ensures end-to-end delivery of data between different nodes. In addition, it establishes a connection between the source and destination node and breaks down larger data into smaller network packets. It also ensures that data integrity (accuracy, completeness, and consistency of data) is complete.

Origin

TCP was first introduced in May 1974 when Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two American electrical engineers described an internetworking protocol to share resources using packet switching within network nodes. The authors worked with Gérard Le Lann on the new network, using ideas from the French CYCLADES project. Vint Cerf and Yogen Dalal wrote the specification for the new protocol, RFC 675 (Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program), which was published in December 1974.

The Transmission Control Program, which included both connection-oriented links and datagram services between servers, was a crucial control component of this system. The monolithic Transmission Control Program was eventually separated into the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol, resulting in a system structure. This led to the development of a networking model known unofficially as TCP/IP. It was officially known as the Department of Defence (DOD) model, the ARPANET model, and finally the Internet Protocol Suite. The Turing Award was given to Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 2004 for their work on TCP/IP.

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