Talk:Contention

Contention in switches

In Head of Line Blocking, it also mentions contention occurring inside switches. Can any expert describe how exactly this happens?

Cheers Joe

I'm assuming you mean networking switches. Simply put, two separate network cards are both transmitting data to a single, third one. On a 100MbE network, both of the two together can transmit at 200 Mbit/s, but the receiver only has capacity to receive 100 Mbit/s, and thus at the maximal rate, half of the packets must to be dropped. In practice however, this isn't a problem since most protocols, notably TCP, employ congestion avoidance algorithms that limit their rate and immediatelly cut back when a packet is dropped. In addition to this, most switches have some buffer space which is used when a port is already congested (see store and forward) and packets are dropped when the buffer is full. -- intgr 22:59, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

articles for deletion

I have requested some articles which this page disambiguates, but which then redirect to this page be deleted. After this they will appear as redlinks for people to start those pages. Grumpyyoungman01 22:34, 18 November 2006 (UTC)