What Makes TCP Reliable?
Through this writing, I would like to highlights why TCP is reliable. You might be wondering, “What’s the deal with TCP anyway?”
What is TCP
TCP is like the backbone of the internet. It’s what keeps our connections reliable and guarantee data integrity. Unlike its counterpart, UDP, TCP doesn’t mess around when it comes to delivering your data. Think of TCP as your trusty courier, making sure your package gets to its destination no matter what. Even if there’s a hiccup along the way, TCP has your back and will make sure your data gets where it needs to go.
What makes it reliable?
But what exactly makes TCP so reliable? It all comes down to two key things: retransmission and flow control. If a piece of your data goes missing or doesn’t make it to the receiver, TCP will simply resend it using retransmission. Plus, TCP is smart about how it sends data. It won’t bombard the receiver with packets — it’ll wait until it knows the previous packet has been received before sending the next one. That’s the kind of reliability we can count on.
Is it important to understand TCP?
So, why does understanding TCP matter? Whether you’re a network guru or a software whiz, TCP is essential knowledge. It helps us troubleshoot network issues and ensures smooth communication between clients and servers. Plus, knowing your way around TCP can give you a deeper understanding of how the internet really works.
Often times, we will have the problems in the network space, and TCP is really playing a big role for that. In order to find the root cause when the problem occurs on the system, we can use TCP as the first stop for troubleshooting. If the TCP looks healthy (meaning there is no anomaly delay, no zero-window size, etc) then we go to upper layer to the application. On the contrary, when the tcp is not healthy then most likely we need to go down to check the network.
In other words, understanding tcp is important both for network and software engineer. We need to understand why tcp is reliable, how it works, and familiar with this protocol in a packet level. What I mean by that, we have to be familiar analyzing tcp packet using tool such as Wireshark where we can see in much more detail what is happening behind the scenes in TCP protocol.