Understanding the TCP/IP protocol
In the TCP/IP protocol suite, there are dozens of different protocols, but the most important ones are TCP and IP. IP provides addressing, datagram routing, and other functions for connecting one machine to another, while TCP is responsible for managing connections and provides reliable data transport between processes on two machines. IP is located in the network layer (layer 3) in the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, whereas TCP is located in the transport layer (layer 4) of OSI.
Besides TCP, the other key protocol in the transport layer is UDP. You may ask what the differences between these two protocols are.
In brief, TCP has the following characteristics:
This is a connection-oriented protocol: Before TCP can be used to send data, the client and the server that want to communicate must establish a TCP connection using a three-way handshake mechanism, as follows:
The client initiates the connection by sending a packet containing a SYN (synchronize...