TCP Connections

TCP  is an end to end point to point  transport  used in internet. being a point  to point  protocols  means that  there is always  s single  sender  a single  receiver for a  TCP session. Being  an end to end protocols  on the other  hand  means that the TCP  session  should  cover al parameters and transportation involved form the  source host to  the destination host. The  latter is an  important  features of the TCP  and should  never e  forgotten during  the analysis  any TCP/ IP network or a protocol  design.

TCP is a pipelined protocols. This means that the TCP  packed  data units  which are  commonly  named TCP segments  are logically  enclosed  in a pipe  and thus they  will be  successively transported within  the end to end  TCP  connections. This  is one of  the reliability  features of the TCP  so that  all TCP segments will be delivered to the  receiver host in the means  that even  if the segment are delivered in a different order TCP will  make  them in order before passing them  to the higher layer protocols that is the  application  layer  figure  show  the logical  pipelining in TCP.

The are buffers at both  sides of a TCP  connections. The  TCP connection however is not seen  by the network elements  such as  routers as they  work at layer below  the transport  layer. These network  elements  just see  the datagram's  that is  the IP layer  packets.

TCP  provides  a means  of full  duplex  data transfer. Therefore  a bidirectional  data flow  is available  in the same TCP connection. TCP puts  a maximum  segment size ( MSS)  on its  data. This MSS  is usually  less than  1500 bytes  but in  practical  network  even smaller  MSS  is used  around 500bytes.

TCP is a connection oriented  protocols. This means  that before  any data transfer  could  be started  a connection must be  established  through  a process called  three way during  this process.

TCP  utilizes a  complete  flow control  flow  control  mechanism . by  this methods TCP not  only  entries that the  sender  host  does not overwhelm the  receiver host sending  too much  data  too fast but  also  ensures a fair  bandwidth  share among, all TCP  sessions  concurrently  used.