what is TCP/IP?

                     Transmission Control Protocol

TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, which is a set of networking protocols that allows two or more computers to communicate. The Defense Data Network, part of the Department of Defense, developed TCP/IP, and it has been widely adopted as a networking standard.

The entire internet protocol suite -- a set of rules and procedures -- is commonly referred to as TCP/IP, though others are included in the suite.

TCP/IP specifies how data is exchanged over the internet by providing end-to-end communications that identify how it should be broken into packets, addressed, transmitted, routed and received at the destination. TCP/IP requires little central management, and it is designed to make networks reliable, with the ability to recover automatically from the failure of any device on the network.

The two main protocols in the internet protocol suite serve specific functions. TCP defines how applications can create channels of communication across a network. It also manages how a message is assembled into smaller packets before they are then transmitted over the internet and reassembled in the right order at the destination address.

IP defines how to address and route each packet to make sure it reaches the right destination. Each gateway computer on the network checks this IP address to determine where to forward the message.

The Internet protocol suite is the conceptual model and set of communications protocols used on the Internet and similar computer networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP because the foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). It is occasionally known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model, because the development of the networking method was funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.

The Internet protocol suite provides end-to-end data communication specifying how data should be packetized, addressed, transmitted, routed, and received. This functionality is organized into four abstraction layers which classify all related protocols according to the scope of networking involved.^[1][2] From lowest to highest, the layers are the link layer, containing communication methods for data that remains within a single network segment (link); the internet layer, providing internetworking between independent networks; the transport layer handling host-to-host communication; and the application layer, which provides process-to-process data exchange for applications.Technical standards specifying the Internet protocol suite and many of its constituent protocols are maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The Internet protocol suite predates the OSI model, a more comprehensive reference framework for general networking systems.