The internet protocols are the world’s most popular open-system (nonproprietary) protocol suite because they can be used to communicate across any set of interconnected networks and are equally well suited for LAN and WAN communication protocols, of which the two best known are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), but it also specifies common applications such as electronic mail, terminal emulation and file transfer.
Internet Protocols were first developed in the mid-1970s, when Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) became interested in establishing a packet-switched network that would facilitate communication between dissimilar computer systems at research institutions. TCP/IP later was included with Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX and has since become the foundation on which the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are based.
The Internet protocol (IP) is a network-layer (Layer 3) protocol that contains addressing information and some control information that enables packets to be routed. IP is documented in RFC 791 and is the primary network-layer protocol in the internet protocol suite. Along with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), IP represents the heart of the Internet protocols. IP has two primary responsibilities which are providing connectionless, best-effort delivery of datagram’s through an internet work, and providing fragmentation and reassembly of datagram’s to support data links with different maximum-transmission unit (MTU) sizes.
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