TCP Evolution and Comparison: Which TCP Will Scale to Meet the Demands of Today's Internet?

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the most common transport layer protocol that provides a reliable stream of data end-to-end from a server to a client, possibly over unreliable paths. The basic design was invented by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in their 1974 paper "A protocol for packet network intercommunication". It was subsequently developed into the TCP/IP standard in 1981. The original TCP standard includes a mechanism to prevent a TCP sender from overwhelming a TCP receiver, but no mechanism to prevent a TCP sender from overwhelming the network (What Was Called Congestion Control). This worked well at the time because the hosts were slow and small in number, and hence the network was rarely the bottleneck.