Data Link Layer Services-Flow Control
Flow Control
• Another important design issue that occurs in the data link layer (and higher layers as well) is what to do with a sender that systematically wants to transmit frames faster than a receiver can accept them.
• This situation can easily occur when the sender is running on a fast computer and the receiver is running on a slow machine.
• The usual solution is to introduce flow control to throttle the sender into sending no faster than the receiver can handle the traffic.
• Various flow control schemes are known, but most of them use the same basic principle. The protocol contains well-defined rules about when a sender may transmit the next frame.
