Disadvantages of Sliding Window Protocol
- Complexity: The sliding window protocol can be complex to implement and can require a lot of memory and processing power to operate efficiently.
- Delay: The protocol can introduce a delay in the transmission of data, as each packet must be acknowledged before the next packet can be transmitted. This delay can increase the overall latency of the network.
- Limited Bandwidth Utilization: The sliding window protocol may not be able to utilize the full available bandwidth of the network, particularly in high-speed networks, due to the overhead of the protocol.
- Window Size Limitations: The maximum size of the sliding window can be limited by the size of the receiver’s buffer or the available network resources, which can affect the overall performance of the protocol.
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.