Ethernet (contd.) - 9 : Ethernet and Flow control
This playlist about Ethernet describes the history, development, and basic operation of Ethernet, the most common LAN protocol.
A continued look at Ethernet, including enhancements made since the protocol was introduced and its future direction.
• 15 : Ethernet - Fundamentals of Commu...
Everyone saw Ethernet becoming faster and faster as a good thing, but in fact, the option to have multiple simultaneous bandwidths in an Ethernet network brought some problems.
One of the biggest was controlling the flow of traffic. For example, what happens if a station capable of transmitting at 1 gigabit was sending to another station, via a switch, and the remote station was only capable of receiving 100, or even 10 megabits?
To get back to our example, the first station sends at 1 gigabit to its switch port, and the switch resends at a slower speed to the receiving station. However, if there is too much data, the switch's memory fills up, and data is lost.
What was needed was another standard - in this case, the 802.3x standard. This specification defined a protocol that allows one Ethernet device to tell another device to slow down. Implementing this standard resolved most of the mixed bandwidth flow control issues associated with Ethernet.
#ethernet #CSMA #lanprotocol