What is "transmission control protocol"

n. a protocol developed for the internet to get data from one network device to another; "TCP uses a retransmission strategy to insure that data will not be lost in transmission" [syn: TCP]

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a core protocol of the Internet protocol suite. 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. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets between applications running on hosts communicating over an IP network. Major Internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration and file transfer rely on TCP. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a connectionless datagram service that emphasizes reduced latency over reliability.