Previous | Next --- Slide 14 of 45
Back to Lecture Thumbnails
Kapteyn

I was a unsure about the meaning of flow control in class.

From what I've gathered, it seems flow control is something that is controlled by the receivers in a network. The receivers tell the senders to stop or slow down sending packets when they sense that they cannot handle any or much more data.

A sudden burst of network traffic can cause a particular switch or end node to be overloaded with packets (filling up its buffer) at which point flow control would kick in and that switch or node would tell the senders to stop/slow down the sending of packets.