Advantages of Sliding Window Protocol
- Efficiency: The sliding window protocol is an efficient method of transmitting data across a network because it allows multiple packets to be transmitted at the same time. This increases the overall throughput of the network.
- Reliable: The protocol ensures reliable delivery of data, by requiring the receiver to acknowledge receipt of each packet before the next packet can be transmitted. This helps to avoid data loss or corruption during transmission.
- Flexibility: The sliding window protocol is a flexible technique that can be used with different types of network protocols and topologies, including wireless networks, Ethernet, and IP networks.
- Congestion Control: The sliding window protocol can also help control network congestion by adjusting the size of the window based on the network conditions, thereby preventing the network from becoming overwhelmed with too much traffic.
Sliding Window Protocol | Set 1 (Sender Side)
The Stop and Wait ARQ offers error and flow control but may cause big performance issues as the sender always waits for acknowledgment even if it has the next packet ready to send. Consider a situation where you have a high bandwidth connection and propagation delay is also high (you are connected to some server in some other country through a high-speed connection), you can’t use this full speed due to limitations of stop and wait.
Sliding Window protocol handles this efficiency issue by sending more than one packet at a time with a larger sequence number. The idea is the same as pipelining in architecture.