Web Caching and Replication

3.7. Summary

TCP is the most-used transport layer protocol on the Internet: it carries nearly all of today's Web traffic. TCP provides most services that an application could expect including reliable delivery, exactly-once delivery, ordered delivery, connection-oriented service, stream-based service, full duplex delivery, and flow and congestion control. In addition, TCP introduces port numbers that address individual applications on a host.

On the other hand, TCP introduces overheads that may limit transfer throughput below the physical network capacity, especially in modern high-speed networks. In particular, the TCP handshake adds an initial delay before the actual data transfer begins; TCP slow start limits throughput in the initial phase ...