Flow control (data): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:22, 6 June 2020

Revision as of 11:55, 18 July 2020

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Sliding-window flow control is best utilized when the buffer size is limited and pre-established. During a typical communication between a sender and a receiver the receiver allocates buffer space for ''n'' frames (''n'' is the buffer size in frames). The sender can send and the receiver can accept ''n'' frames without having to wait for an acknowledgement. A sequence number is assigned to frames in order to help keep track of those frames which did receive an acknowledgement. The receiver acknowledges a frame by sending an acknowledgement that includes the sequence number of the next frame expected. This acknowledgement announces that the receiver is ready to receive n frames, beginning with the number specified. Both the sender and receiver maintain what is called a window. The size of the window is less than or equal to the buffer size.

Sliding window flow control has a far better performance than stop-and-wait flow control. For example, in a wireless environment if data rates are low and noise level is very high, waiting for an acknowledgement for every packet that is transferred is not very feasible. Therefore, transferring data as a bulk would yield a better performance in terms of higher throughput.

Sliding window flow control is a point to point protocol assuming that no other entity tries to communicate until the current data transfer is complete. The window maintained by the sender indicates which frames heit can send. The sender sends all the frames in the window and waits for an acknowledgement (as opposed to acknowledging after every frame). The sender then shifts the window to the corresponding sequence number, thus indicating that frames within the window starting from the current sequence number can be sent.

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