What is the difference between flow control and congestion control?

What is the difference between flow control and congestion control? Where can I find more information on this?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

TCP's four congestion control algorithms include: slow start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmit, and fast recovery. Congestion control basically states that a network device can transmit only a certain number of packets and can not add more packets to a network until an acknowledgement is received. http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/Homepages/shivkuma/research/cong-papers.html has some good papers on the topic.

Flow control works by refusing new connections until congestion is resolved. In serial transmissions, Xon/Xoff is used for flow control. It is a handshaking mechanism that will keep a sender from sending data faster than a receiver can receive it.

This was first published in September 2003

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.
    Back to top