Flow Control and Buffer Management

Using flow control and buffer management techniques, data packet transmission rates and buffer queue capacity can be managed to provide the preferred quality of service (QoS).

Flow control manages the rate of data transmission between two devices to avoid overloading the receiving device with data. Using a technique that allows the receiving device to control the data transmission speed, flow control can prevent data packets from being dropped.

Buffer management controls whether the data packets are channeled to buffer queues before processing or allowed to pass through the device. Packet buffer management uses priorities, and lower priority data traffic is routed to buffers which have a finite amount of memory. If the device buffers are full when a packet arrives, the packet may be dropped.

In this section:

  1. Priority Flow Control
    The RUCKUS implementation of priority flow control (PFC) prevents frame loss from congestion by pausing traffic based on the congested priority without affecting the traffic of uncongested priorities.
Parent topic: Quality of Service