Data Link

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Data-link Control & Protocols

Data-link layer is responsible for implementation of point-to-point flow and error control
mechanism.

Flow Control
When a data frame (Layer-2 data) is sent from one host to another over a single medium, it
is required that the sender and receiver should work at the same speed. That is, sender sends
at a speed on which the receiver can process and accept the data. What if the speed
(hardware/software) of the sender or receiver differs? If sender is sending too fast the
receiver may be overloaded, (swamped) and data may be lost.

Two types of mechanisms can be deployed to control the flow:

• Stop and Wait


This flow control mechanism forces the sender after transmitting a data frame to
stop and wait until the acknowledgement of the data-frame sent is received.

• Sliding Window
In this flow control mechanism, both sender and receiver agree on the number
of data-frames after which the acknowledgement should be sent. As we
learnt, stop and wait flow control mechanism wastes resources, this protocol
tries to make use of underlying resources as much as possible.

Error Control
When data-frame is transmitted, there is a probability that data-frame may be lost in the
transit or it is received corrupted. In both cases, the receiver does not receive the correct data-
frame and sender does not know anything about any loss.In such case, both sender and
receiver are equipped with some protocols which helps them to detect transit errors such as
loss of data-frame. Hence, either the sender retransmits the data-frame or the receiver may
request to resend the previous data-frame.

Requirements for error control mechanism:

• Error detection - The sender and receiver, either both or any, must ascertain
that there is some error in the transit.
• Positive ACK - When the receiver receives a correct frame, it should
acknowledge it.
• Negative ACK - When the receiver receives a damaged frame or a duplicate
frame, it sends a NACK back to the sender and the sender must retransmit the
correct frame.
• Retransmission: The sender maintains a clock and sets a timeout period. If an
acknowledgement of a data-frame previously transmitted does not arrive
before the timeout the sender retransmits the frame, thinking that the frame
or it’s acknowledgement is lost in transit.
There are three types of techniques available which Data-link layer may deploy to control
the errors by Automatic Repeat Requests (ARQ):

• Stop-and-wait ARQ

The following transition may occur in Stop-and-Wait ARQ:


o The sender maintains a timeout counter.
o When a frame is sent, the sender starts the timeout counter.
o If acknowledgement of frame comes in time, the sender transmits the
next frame in queue.
o If acknowledgement does not come in time, the sender assumes that
either the frame or its acknowledgement is lost in transit. Sender
retransmits the frame and starts the timeout counter.
o If a negative acknowledgement is received, the sender retransmits
the frame.
• Go-Back-N ARQ
Stop and wait ARQ mechanism does not utilize the resources at their
best.When the acknowledgement is received, the sender sits idle and does
nothing. In Go-Back-N ARQ method, both sender and receiver maintain a
window.
The sending-window size enables the sender to send multiple frames without
receiving the acknowledgement of the previous ones. The receiving-window
enables the receiver to receive multiple frames and acknowledge them. The
receiver keeps track of incoming frame’s sequence number.
When the sender sends all the frames in window, it checks up to what
sequence number it has received positive acknowledgement. If all frames are
positively acknowledged, the sender sends next set of frames. If sender finds
that it has received NACK or has not receive any ACK for a particular frame, it
retransmits all the frames after which it does not receive any positive ACK.
• Selective Repeat ARQ
In Go-back-N ARQ, it is assumed that the receiver does not have any buffer
space for its window size and has to process each frame as it comes. This
enforces the sender to retransmit all the frames which are not acknowledged.

In Selective-Repeat ARQ, the receiver while keeping track of sequence


numbers, buffers the frames in memory and sends NACK for only frame which
is missing or damaged.
The sender in this case, sends only packet for which NACK is received.

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