What is the difference between flow control and error control?

Both flow control and error control mechanisms are present at the data connection and transport layerIt provides transparent transfer of data between end users, providing reliable data transfer services to the upper layers.. When the sender delivers data to the receiver, these two procedures provide reliable data to the recipient.

Flow Control

It refers to a collection of protocols instructing the sender how much data it may transfer before waiting for the receiver's acknowledgment.

Flow control is a design challenge at the data connection and transport layers. The sender transmits data frames It is a data structure that organizes data into a 2-dimensional table of rows and columns, much like a spreadsheet. quicker than the recipient can accept them. This might be because the sender is running on a robust system. Even if the data is received without mistake in this situation, the receiver cannot accept the frame at this pace and loses several structures.

This will result in network waste frames. As a result, the receiving device must have a method to alert the sender to deliver fewer frames or temporarily halt transmission. Flow control will thus limit the frame transmission rate to a value the receiver can handle.

Two control approaches are used to reduce frame loss: feedback-based flow control and rate-based flow control.

Feedback-based flow control

When the sender transmits data to the receiver, the receiver returns the information, allowing the sender to transfer more data or notify the sender about how the receiver performs. The feedback-based control protocols are the sliding window protocol and the stop-and-wait protocol.

Rate-based flow control

When a sender transmits data faster to the receiver and the receiver cannot receive the data at that speed, the protocol's built-in mechanism limits the rate at which the sender delivers data without any feedback from the receiver.

Error control

Error control is a problem that arises at the data connection and transport layers. It is a system for identifying and fixing errors in frames sent from the transmitter to the receiver. The fault in the structure may have been a single-bit error or a burst error. A single-bit mistake happens solely in the frame's one-bit data unit, where one is converted to 0 and vice versa.

The mechanism for error control employed for the noisy channel is termed automatic repeat request.It is an error-control method for data transmission that uses acknowledgements and timeouts to achieve reliable data transmission over an unreliable communication channel.

Burst errors arise when more than one bit in a frame is modified and related to packet-level errors. In burst error, errors such as packet loss, frame duplication, acknowledgment packet loss, and so on can occur. Parity checking, cyclic redundancy code (CRC), and checksum are methods for detecting errors in frames.

Parity Checking

A single bit is added to the frame during parity testingIt is a technique that checks whether data has been lost or written over when it is transmitted between computers. to indicate whether the number of '1' bits contained in the frame is even or odd. If a single bit is modified during transmission, the parity bit is likewise updated, reflecting the mistake in the frame. However, the parity checking method is untrustworthy because if an even number of bits is modified, the parity bit will not reflect any problem in the frame. It is, nonetheless, excellent for single-bit mistakes.

Cyclic redundancy code

The data is binarily divided, and the residual is connected to the data and sent to the receiver. The received information is then divided by the same divisor with which the sender splits the data. If the resulting residual is 0, the data is accepted. Otherwise, the information is refused, and the sender must retransmit it.

Checksum

The checksum technique divides the data into equal pieces, each of which has n bits. All of the fragments are joined together using 1's complement 1's complement of a binary number is another binary number obtained by toggling all bits in it, i.e., transforming the 0 bit to 1 and the 1 bit to 0.. The result is computed again and is known as a checksum, connected to the original data sent to the recipient.

When the receiver gets the data, it separates it into equal fragments and then adds all elements using 1's complement; the result is then complemented again. If the result is zero, the data is accepted. Otherwise, it is refused and the sender must retransmit the data.

Differences

The critical distinction between flow control and error control is that flow control monitors the proper flow of data from sender to receiver, whereas error control monitors that the data given to the recipient is error-free and trustworthy.

Here are some other critical differences given below: