Protocol Standards

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) controls how individual messages are broken up into packets by the sender and reassembled by the receiver. It provides the appearance to the user that there is a dedicated error-free connection between computers.

Internet Protocol (IP) standardizes routing of packets across multiple networks. There is no central control point which tells how to route a message; instead at each "hop" the decision is made to send the message next based on the destination. The machine which send the message does not know how the message will end up getting to the destination.