TCP
termnetworking
Stands for: Transmission Control Protocol
The transport that turns a stream of packets into an ordered, reliable byte stream, by numbering what it sends and retransmitting what is not acknowledged.
Everything TCP does follows from one fact: the network underneath makes no promises. Packets may be lost, duplicated, reordered or delayed, so ordering, retransmission, flow control and congestion control all live in the endpoints rather than in the network. That decision is why the internet could be built from links nobody controlled centrally, and it is also why a single lossy hop degrades a session end to end. The three-way handshake, the sequence numbers and the window are the visible parts; the interesting part is that the sender infers the state of a network it cannot see from the timing of its own packets.
Also known as: Transmission Control Protocol