The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, file transfer and streaming media rely on TCP, which is part of the transport layer of the TCP/IP suite. SSL/TLS often runs on top of TCP. Today, TCP remains a core protocol for most Internet communication, ensuring reliable data transfer across diverse networks.

TCP is connection-oriented, meaning that sender and receiver firstly need to establish a connection based on agreed parameters; they do this through a three-way handshake procedure. The server must be listening (passive open) for connection requests from clients before a connection is established. Three-way handshake (active open), retransmission, and error detection adds to reliability but lengthens latency. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) instead, which provides a connectionless datagram service that prioritizes time over reliability. TCP employs network congestion avoidance. However, there are vulnerabilities in TCP, including denial of service, connection hijacking, TCP veto, and reset attack.

In May 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn described an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet switching among network nodes. The authors had been working with Gérard Le Lann to incorporate concepts from the French CYCLADES project into the new network. The specification of the resulting protocol, RFC 675 (Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program), was written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, and published in December 1974. It contains the first attested use of the term internet, as a shorthand for internetwork.^{[citation needed]}

The Transmission Control Program incorporated both connection-oriented links and datagram services between hosts. In version 4, the monolithic Transmission Control Program was divided into a modular architecture consisting of the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. This resulted in a networking model that became known informally as TCP/IP, although formally it was variously referred to as the DoD internet architecture model (DoD model for short) or DARPA model. Later, it became the part of, and synonymous with, the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP continues to evolve, with incremental updates and best practices formalized in RFCs such as RFC 9293 (2022).

The following Internet Experiment Note (IEN) documents describe the evolution of TCP into the modern version:

TCP was standardized in January 1980 as RFC 761.

In 2004, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn received the Turing Award for their foundational work on TCP/IP.

The Transmission Control Protocol provides a communication service at an intermediate level between an application program and the Internet Protocol. It provides host-to-host connectivity at the transport layer of the Internet model. An application does not need to know the particular mechanisms for sending data via a link to another host, such as the required IP fragmentation to accommodate the maximum transmission unit of the transmission medium. At the transport layer, TCP handles all handshaking and transmission details and presents an abstraction of the network connection to the application typically through a network socket interface.