Many applications require reliability and other services provided by TCP. These are applications that can tolerate some delay or performance loss due to the overhead imposed by TCP.

This makes TCP best suited for applications that need reliable transport and can tolerate some delay. TCP is a great example of how the different layers of the TCP/IP protocol suite have specific roles. Because the transport layer protocol TCP handles all tasks associated with segmenting the data stream into segments, reliability, flow control, and reordering of segments, it frees the application from having to manage any of this. The application can simply send the data stream to the transport layer and use the services of TCP.

As shown in the figure, some examples of well-known applications that use TCP include: