TCP/IP

TCP/IP TCP/IP (The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the protocol suite that drives the Internet). The suite is actually composed of several protocols including IP which handles the movement of data between host computers, TCP which manages the movement of data between applications, UDP which also manages the movement of data between applications but is less complex and reliable than TCP, and ICMP which transmits error messages and network traffic statistics. TCP …

…the network must stay up, so the Department of Defense designed TCP/IP to be robust and automatically recover from any node or phone line failure. Networks running TCP/IP automatically (and silently) reconfigure themselves to take a different path when something goes wrong. This design allows the construction of very large networks with less central management. However, because of the automatic recovery, network problems can go undiagnosed and uncorrected for long periods of time.