TCP/IP Protocol Suite

By Stephen Bucaro

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is based on ARPANET a network designed by the U. S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1969. Its purpose was to develop a mechanism to communicate between dissimilar operating systems and networks. Because TCP/IP is an open standard protocol it has become the industry standard and is used by the Internet.

The TCP/IP suite of protocols is managed by volunteer organizations. These organizations ensure that TCP/IP is developed in a consistent way. A process has been defined that allows for proposals to add new features or make changes to the protocol suite. A proposed change is published as a Request For Comment (RFC) which is considered by one of the managing organizations.

Internet Managing Organizations

Internet Activities Board (IAB)

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)

Knowledge Required to be a Network Technician

A good portion of the knowledge required to be a Network Technician relates to the TCP/IP protocol suite. You might divide your study of TCP/IP into four sections as outlined below.

TCP/IP and the OSI model

TCP/IP Addressing

TCP/IP Protocols

TCP/IP Utilities

TCP/IP Configuration

TCP/IP Protocols

This is a list of the most important protocols in the TCP/IP protocol suite. The suite contains many other less frequently used protocols.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

TCP operates at the Transport layer to provide a connection-based protocol that provides reliable data delivery. TCP opens up a communications tunnel for a specific port and service between two computers. At the transmitting end it breaks the stream of data into segments. It performs a mathematical operation on the data bits in the segment and attaches the result (called the checksum) to the segment. It then assigns a sequence number to each segment as it is sent. TCP uses IP as the transport mechanism between the two computers.