What is the Hand-Shake Method?

The basic idea of the hand-shake method is based on the general rule that before starting the transmission of data, some series of steps are taken in a logical order by the sender and the receiver in order to ensure delivery of the data. Below are those operations described in brief :

• SYN (Synchronize) : The SYN is a simple flag to indicate that some node (sender) will start communication with it soon. And is sent to the receiver by the sender.
• Response of the receiver in SYN-ACK format: ACK is for acknowledging to the sender about the SYN flag received and the other flag SYN is for indicating the sequence number from which transmission is to be started.
• Finally, the sender again sends an ACK to the receiver, acknowledging the response and hence establishing a reliable connection.

Only after the above steps are performed, the actual data transmission will start.

For more details, refer to the article: TCP-3 way handshake.

TCP is a standard connection-oriented protocol that works under the following conditions before any transmission takes place between both devices:

Establish a logical connection with the device on receiver’s end

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a protocol of the transport layer, which is the “Heart of OSI“. And it’s a connection-oriented protocol, and two primary reasons for that are:

1. The sender and the receiver stay connected until the transmission process is fully completed and also ensures that the data reaches its destination. If any data is lost, then the receiver asks the sender to re-transmit it.
2. The order of the data sent by the sender is the same on the receiver’s end as well.

The path from which the packet transmission will take place will be decided prior to the transmission process, and it basically uses a method called – “The 3-way Hand-shake Method”.