Internet Protocol Suite

TCP/IP refers to the Internet suite of protocols. It includes a set of standards that specify how computers communicate and gives conventions for connecting networks and routing traffic through the connections.

The Internet protocols are a result of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) research project on network interconnection in the late 1970s. It was mandated on all United States defense long-haul networks in 1983 but was not widely accepted until it was integrated with 4.2 Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX. The popularity of TCP/IP is based on the following features:

• Robust client-server framework. TCP/IP is an excellent client-server application platform, especially in wide area network (WAN) environments.
• Information sharing. Thousands of academic, military, scientific, and commercial organizations share data, electronic mail, and services on the Internet using TCP/IP.
• General availability. Implementations of TCP/IP are available on nearly every popular computer operating system. Source code is widely available for many implementations. Vendors for bridges, routers, and network analyzers all offer support for the TCP/IP protocol suite within their products.

The following discussion introduces the components of the IP protocol suite. Some knowledge of the architecture and interaction between TCP/IP components is useful for both administrators and users, but most of the details discussed here are transparent when you are actually using TCP/IP.