Flow Control

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Prevents a fast sender from overwhelming a slow receiver. The receiver advertises a window size indicating how much data it can buffer. The sender must not send more than this window. Uses a sliding window protocol to efficiently utilize the link while respecting receiver capacity.

Key Properties

• Sliding Window
• Receiver Window
• Window Scaling

Related

• Congestion Control (prevents overwhelming the network, not just receiver)
• Backpressure (application-level flow control)

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networking tcp