Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

Also known as: TCP

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. TLS/SSL often runs on top of TCP.

TCP includes error checking, which ensures each packet is delivered as requested. This differs from UDP, which does not check if each packet was successfully transmitted.