TCP/IP How To
Last Updated 10/23/2017
TCP/IP is short for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the suite of communications protocols used to connect hosts on the Internet. TCP/IP uses several protocols, the two main ones being TCP and IP. TCP/IP is built into the UNIX operating system and is used by the Internet, making it the de facto standard for transmitting data over networks. Even network operating systems that have their own protocols, such as Netware, also support TCP/IP.
Transmission Control Protocol
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a virtual circuit protocol that is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite, often simply referred to as TCP/IP. Using TCP, applications on networked hosts can create connections to one another, over which they can exchange streams of data using Stream Sockets. The protocol guarantees reliable and in-order delivery of data from sender to receiver. TCP also distinguishes data for multiple connections by concurrent applications (e.g., Web server and e-mail server) running on the same host.
TCP supports many of the Internet's most popular application protocols and resulting applications, including the World Wide Web, e-mail and Secure Shell.
In the Internet protocol suite, TCP is the intermediate layer between the Internet Protocol (IP) below it, and an application above it. Applications often need reliable pipe-like connections to each other, whereas the Internet Protocol does not provide such streams, but rather only best effort delivery (i.e., unreliable packets). TCP does the task of the transport layer in the simplified OSI model of computer networks. The other main transport-level Internet protocol is UDP.
Applications send streams of octets (8-bit bytes) to TCP for delivery through the network, and TCP divides the byte stream into appropriately sized segments (usually delineated by the maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of the data link layer of the network to which the computer is attached). TCP then passes the resulting packets to the Internet Protocol, for delivery through a network to the TCP module of the entity at the other end. TCP checks to make sure that no packets are lost by giving each packet a sequence number, which is also used to make sure that the data are delivered to the entity at the other end in the correct order. The TCP module at the far end sends back an acknowledgement for packets which have been successfully received; a timer at the sending TCP will cause a timeout if an acknowledgement is not received within a reasonable round-trip time (or RTT), and the (presumably lost) data will then be re-transmitted. The TCP checks that no bytes are damaged by using a checksum; one is computed at the sender for each block of data before it is sent, and checked at the receiver.
Unlike TCP's traditional counterpart, User Datagram Protocol, which can immediately start sending packets, TCP provides connections that need to be established before sending data. TCP connections have three phases:
1. connection establishment
2. data transfer
3. connection termination
Before describing these three phases, a note about the various states of a connection end-point or Internet socket:
represents waiting for a connection request from any remote TCP and port. (usually set by TCP servers)
represents waiting for the remote TCP to send back a TCP packet with the SYN and ACK flags set. (usually set by TCP clients)
represents waiting for the remote TCP to send back an acknowledgment after having sent back a connection acknowledgment to the remote TCP. (usually set by TCP servers)
represents that the port is ready to receive/send data from/to the remote TCP. (set by TCP clients and servers)
represents waiting for enough time to pass to be sure the remote TCP received the acknowledgment of its connection termination request. According to RFC 793 a connection can stay in TIME-WAIT for a maximum of four minutes.
TCP uses the notion of port numbers to identify sending and receiving application end-points on a host, or Internet sockets. Each side of a TCP connection has an associated 16-bit unsigned port number (1-65535) reserved by the sending or receiving application. Arriving TCP data packets are identified as belonging to a specific TCP connection by its sockets, that is, the combination of source host address, source port, destination host address, and destination port. This means that a server computer can provide several clients with several services simultaneously, as long as a client takes care of initiating any simultaneous connections to one destination port from different source ports.
Port numbers are categorized into three basic categories: well-known, registered, and dynamic/private. The well-known ports are assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and are typically used by system-level or root processes. Well-known applications running as servers and passively listening for connections typically use these ports. Some examples include: FTP (21), TELNET (23), SMTP (25) and HTTP (80). Registered ports are typically used by end user applications as ephemeral source ports when contacting servers, but they can also identify named services that have been registered by a third party. Dynamic/private ports can also be used by end user applications, but are less commonly so. Dynamic/private ports do not contain any meaning outside of any particular TCP connection.