Chapter 3. Transmission Control Protocol

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the transport protocol used by the Web to deliver requests from clients to servers and Web objects from servers to clients. TCP properties have a profound effect on the performance of the Web in general and on many design choices in Web caching and replication in particular. This chapter introduces TCP at a level sufficient for understanding the rest of the book. There are a number of sources for more detailed information on TCP, including books by Comer [1991] and Peterson and Davie [1996].

The IP protocol described in the previous chapter provides the minimal functionality necessary to connect multiple networks: it allows one host to send a datagram to another, ...

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