The transport and services area - usually just called "transport area" or "TSV area" - covers a range of technical topics related to data transport in the Internet.

The Transport Area works on mechanisms related to end-to-end data transport to support Internet applications and services that exchange potentially large volumes of traffic at potentially high bandwidths. A key focus are mechanisms to detect and react to congestion in the Internet, such as the congestion control algorithms in Internet transport control protocols such as TCP, SCTP, and DCCP, as well as congestion management schemes such as PCN and CONEX.

Current and new transport work includes congestion signaling and reporting, forward error correction, multicast, QoS and reservation signaling, DiffServ? and congestion control for unresponsive flows, NAT regularization and specification, storage protocols for the Internet, peer-to-peer streaming, performance metrics for Internet paths, experimentation with congestion control schemes developed in the IRTF, multipath extensions to existing transport protocols, congestion control for "background" bulk transfers, and extensions to the IETF protocols for multimedia transport.

The transport area intersects most frequently with Internet area, the applications area, the RAI area, the security area and several IRTF research groups.