Internet Core Protocols: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 7. The Transmission Control Protocol

Summary	The Transmission Control Protocol provides a reliable, connection-oriented transport protocol for transaction-oriented applications to use. TCP is used by almost all of the application protocols found on the Internet today, as most of them require a reliable, error-correcting transport layer in order to ensure that data does not get lost or corrupted.
Protocol ID	6
Relevant STDs	2 (http://www.iana.org/); 3 (includes RFCs 1122 and 1123); 7 (RFC 793, republished)
Relevant RFCs	793 (Transmission Control Protocol); 896 (The Nagle Algorithm); 1122 (Host Network Requirements); 1323 (Window Scale and Timestamp); 2018 (Selective Acknowledgments); 2581 (TCP Congestion Control);
Related RFCs	1072 (Extensions for High Delay) 1106 (Negative Acknowledgments); 1146 (Alternate Checksums); 1337 (Observations on RFC 1323); 1644 (Transaction Extensions); 1948 (Defending Against Sequence Number Attacks); 2414 (Increasing the Initial Window); 2525 (Known TCP Implementation Problems); 2582 (Experimental New Reno Modifications to Fast Recovery)

On an IP network, applications use two standard transport protocols to communicate with each other. These are the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a lightweight and unreliable transport service, and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which provides a reliable and controlled transport service. The majority of Internet applications use TCP, since its built-in reliability and flow control services ensure ...