Transmission Control Protocol

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite, providing reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP.

Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, file transfer and streaming media rely on TCP, which is part of the transport layer of the TCP/IP suite. SSL/TLS often runs on top of TCP. Today, TCP remains a core protocol for most Internet communication, ensuring reliable data transfer across diverse networks.