How do computers 'talk' on the Internet?

TCP / IP is a set of communication protocols that allow computers to communicate with each other over the Internet.

The name of the protocol involves the two most important protocols in the protocol suite - the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP ) and the Internet Internet Protocol (IP ) protocol . Specific TCP / IP devices connect to the Internet and how data is transferred between devices.

TCP / IP was originally built by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn under a contract at the US Department of Defense. TCP / IP is a popular standard that local and wide networks can communicate, allowing computers to connect to each other and for applications to send data back and forth.

There are 4 different abstraction layers in TCP / IP, and each class has its own set of protocols. These classes include:

Connection layer - This is the lowest layer in the TCP / IP stack and is a group of methods that operate on a server connection, commonly known as Ethernet.

Internet layer ( IP ) - This is the layer that connects local networks to each other.

Transport layer ( TCP ) - This is the control layer that communicates the server to the server.

Application layer - The application layer is a set of specific protocols that communicate data on a process layer to the process. For example, HTTP is an application protocol that is the foundation of World Wide Web ( www ).

While this may seem a little confusing, here is a very basic explanation below about how communication is done over the Internet.

On the network, TCP is what applications use to communicate with each other. For example, your web browser ' talks ' to network software using TCP. IP is communication between computers. Therefore IP is responsible for sending packets between computers. It can also route packages to an exact location.

TCP will split the data transferred between applications into packets so that packets can be sent over IP to another computer. TCP also processes packets once packets are transmitted by IP.