Friday, December 28, 2007

Understanding Flow Control

Flow control is done through a mechanism that will control the amount of flow of data in a network. It is done under defined conditions and is the opposite of congestion control which is used when congestion has happened. There are two types, open loop flow control and closed loop flow control.
The difference in these is simple. Open loop flow control mechanism is used when there is no feedback between the transmitter and receiver. In fact this is the most popular means used. In closed loop flow control, the mechanism has the ability to report pending network congestions back and forth to the transmitter. It can adapt its activity to the network conditions.
As mentioned, open loop flow is the most commonly used mechanism. But, it does have some problems as we View the rest of this article


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