The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides a higher level of service. TCP establishes connections between the sender and receiver by using IP addresses and port numbers. It then simulates a bidirectional, continuous communications service. TCP provides reliability of transmission, division of data into packets (without the knowledge of the user program), ordered transmission of packets, simultaneous transfer in both directions, and buffering of data. The format of TCP data is analogous to that of a file in the UNIX operating system. Data are sent or received in a continuous stream of bytes. The data have no record (message) boundaries or any other structure except that agreed to by the connected applications.
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