Flow Control

Flow control refers to a set of procedures used to restrict the amount of data that the sender can send before waiting for acknowledgment.

Flow control coordinates the amount of data that can be sent before receiving an acknowledgment and is one of the most important duties of the data link layer. In most protocols, flow control is a set of procedures that tells the sender how much data it can transmit before it must wait for an acknowledgment from the receiver.

The flow of data must not be allowed to overwhelm the receiver. Any receiving device has a limited speed at which it can process incoming data and a limited amount of memory in which to store incoming data.

The receiving device must be able to inform the sending device before those limits are reached and to request that the transmitting device send fewer frames or stop temporarily.

Incoming data must be checked and processed before they can be used. The rate of such processing is often slower than the rate of transmission. For this reason, each receiving device has a block of memory, called a buffer, reserved for storing incoming data until they are processed.

If the buffer begins to fill up, the receiver must be able to tell the sender to halt transmission until it is once again able to receive.