17.4 Summary

17.4 Summary

TCP provides a reliable, connection-oriented, byte stream, transport layer service. We looked briefly at all the fields in the TCP header and will examine them in detail in the following chapters.

TCP packetizes the user data into segments, sets a timeout any time it sends data, acknowledges data received by the other end, reorders out-of-order data, discards duplicate data, provides end-to-end flow control, and calculates and verifies a mandatory end-to-end checksum.

TCP is used by many of the popular applications, such as Telnet, Rlogin, FTP, and electronic mail (SMTP).