The TCP/IP Protocols

The TCP/IP or Internet Protocol suit forms the basis of the Internet and is the standard for corporate LANS.

The protocols can be viewed as a stack with each layer providing services to the higher layers and abstracting how the services are implemented at the lower levels.. The Internet stack is a simplified form of the idealised OSI 7 layer model beginning at the network layer (layer 3).
The IP layer is the lowest level protocol that still knows about aspects of the physical network. It is responsible for routing "datagrams" to remote hosts. To do this it has the help of a couple of other protocols: the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) to map Internet to hardware addresses and the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) for managing datagrams. ARP is frequently disabled on systems which wish to communicate with a few fixed destinations on the network.

TCP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) provide transport layer services (layer 4). UDP is little more than an application interface to IP. TCP offers a reliable, connection oriented, byte stream service between two applications on an internetwork.
The higher level protocols are related to specific services, for example the World Wide Web uses the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which in turn relies on TCP.

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