Transmit flow control

Transmit flow control: In data communications systems, control of the rate at which data are transmitted from a terminal so that the data can be received by another terminal.

Transmit flow control may occur between data terminal equipment (DTE) and a switching center, via data circuit-terminating equipment (DCE), or between two DTEs. The transmission rate may be controlled because of network or DTE requirements.

Transmit flow control can occur independently in the two directions of data transfer, thus permitting the transfer rates in one direction to be different from the transfer rates in the other direction.

Transmit flow control can be either stop-and-go or use a sliding window.

Flow control can be done either by control lines in a data communication interface (such as RS 232), or by reserving in-band control characters to signal flow start and stop (such as the ASCII codes for XON/XOFF).

An earlier version of this article was based on Federal Standard 1037C.