Comments
www.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Protocols/Q_22826643.html
Posted by sagitraz
Sometimes a receiver can get very busy—imagine a web server that is getting millions of hits an hour. If it receives more segments than it can handle, it might be forced to drop (discard) some; this is not desirable because the senders would then have to retransmit them; this wastes time and bandwidth and increases delay.
The receiver has a method to tell the sender(s) to slow down the transmission rate. It's called the sliding window. The window size indicates how many segments can be sent before an acknowledgment will be sent. If it is not busy, the receiver can handle a large number of segments and send a single acknowledgment. If it gets very busy, it can make the window size very small, allowing the sender(s) to send only a few segments before an acknowledgment is sent.
The window size of the sender and receiver is included in the segment header and can change during the lifetime of the conversation.
Posted by sabastian
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