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Overview

TCP/IP is a suite of data communications protocols. Two of the more important protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP).

IP provides the basic packet delivery service for all TCP/IP networks. IP is a connectionless protocol, which means that it does not exchange control information to establish an end-to-end connection before transmitting data. A connection-oriented protocol exchanges control information with the remote computer to verify that it is ready to receive data before sending it.

IP relies on protocols in other layers to establish the connection if connection-oriented services are required and to provide error detection and error recovery. IP is sometimes called an unreliable protocol, because it contains no error detection or recovery code.

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