TCP

How it is used

Spelled out letter by letter. Web browsing, email and file transfers run over TCP. Engineers talk about TCP ports, TCP sessions, the three-way handshake (SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK) and TCP retransmissions when they analyse slow connections.

Example sentences

1. The capture shows a lot of TCP retransmissions, so packets are being lost somewhere.

2. SSH uses TCP port 22.

Common collocations

• TCP port
• TCP connection
• TCP handshake
• TCP retransmission
• TCP session

Related terms

• UDPShort for User Datagram Protocol: a simple, fast protocol that sends data without setting up a connection and without checking whether it arrived; used for voice, video, DNS and gaming.
• TCP/IPThe family of protocols that the internet and almost all modern networks are built on, named after its two best-known members, TCP and IP.
• portEither a physical socket on a device where a network cable is plugged in, or a number from 0 to 65535 that identifies a particular service on a host, such as 443 for HTTPS.
• protocolA set of agreed rules that defines how devices format, send, receive and check data, so that equipment from different vendors can talk to each other.
• packet captureA recording of the actual packets passing through a network interface, saved to a file so that engineers can analyse exactly what was sent and received.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• TCP · Software Engineering

More terms: Protocols and Services

• DNS
• DHCP
• ARP
• ICMP