I am starting out in IT and am about to complete A+ cert course. I understand that TCP/IP is a foundation element of the internet and is implemented with many other protocols. I would like to know exactly what it’s function is tho. What does it do, how long has it been around, and how it work in tandem with other protocols? I’ve tried researching it but always end up reading a bunch of high level tech jargon.
In: 1
Internet Protocol (IP) controls how data packets are routed over the internet to get to their destination.
Transmission control protocol (TCP) handles establishing a connection between two devices to pass data back and forth and detecting things like packet loss and retransmitting if needed.
Other protocols like http then build on top of TCP/IP.
There are some alternatives to TCP like UDP that run on top of IP for different types of connection but TCP is by far the most common.
There is also a MAC layer (media access control) that runs under all of this that handles the physical link between two devices. This will get replaced each hop along the network. E.g. the MAC layer for WiFi is very different to the one for wired ethernet but the IP layer and above are the same on both.
Latest Answers