flow control


flow control

[′flō kən‚trōl] (engineering) Any system used to control the flow of gases, vapors, liquids, slurries, pastes, or solid particles through or along conduits or channels.

flow control

Measures designed to adjust the flow of traffic into a given airspace, along a given route, or bound for a given aerodrome, so as to ensure the most effective utilization of the airspace (ICAO). ATC (air traffic control) may apply restrictions to the flow of air traffic to ensure that the elements of the common systems, such as airports or airways, do not become saturated.

flow control

(communications, protocol)The collection of techniques usedin serial communications to stop the sender sending data untilthe receiver can accept it. This may be either software flow control or hardware flow control. The receiver typicallyhas a fixed size buffer into which received data is writtenas soon as it is received. When the amount of buffered dataexceeds a "high water mark", the receiver will signal to thetransmitter to stop transmitting until the process reading thedata has read sufficient data from the buffer that it hasreached its "low water mark", at which point the receiversignals to the transmitter to resume transmission.

flow control

(1) The management of transmission between two devices such as nodes in a network or between the CPU and peripheral devices. It provides notification to the sending device to slow down or speed up data transmission or data transfer due to the receiving device's current ability to keep up with it. Flow control also enables slower-speed devices to communicate with higher-speed ones and vice versa. See xon-xoff.

(2) In programming, the if-then and loop statements that make up the program's logic.