A mechanism for offloading the management of send queues in a split socket stack environment, including efficient split socket queue flow control and TCP/IP retransmission support. An Upper Layer Protocol (ULP) creates send work queue entries (SWQEs) for writing to the send work queue (SWQ). The Internet Protocol Suite Offload Engine (IPSOE) is notified of a new entry to the SWQ and it subsequently reads this entry that contains pointers to the data that is to be transmitted. After the data is transmitted and acknowledgments are received, the IPSOE creates a completion queue entry (CQE) that is written into the completion queue (CQ). The flow control between the ULP and the IPSOE is credit based. The passing of CQ credits is the only explicit mechanism required to manage flow control of both the SWQ and the CQ between the ULP and the IPSOE.