- In this method of flow control, the sender sends a single frame to the receiver & waits for an acknowledgment.
- The next frame is sent by the sender only when acknowledgment of the previous frame is received.
- This process of sending a frame & waiting for an acknowledgment continues as long as the sender has data to send.
- To end up the transmission sender transmits an end-of-transmission (EOT) frame.
- The main advantage of stop & wait protocols is the Next frame is transmitted only when the first frame is acknowledged. So there is no chance of the frame being lost.
- The main disadvantage of this method is that it is It makes the transmission process slow. In this method single frame travels from source to destination and a single acknowledgment travels from destination to source. As a result, each frame sent and received uses the entire time needed to traverse the link. Moreover, if two devices are a distance apart, a lot of time is wasted waiting for ACKs which leads to an increase in total transmission time.
