ConnectGear gs-1124 User Guide

Page of 111
User Manual    
Publication date: January, 2005  
Revision A1 
32 
 
3-3. Flow Control 
Flow control is a mechanism to tell the source device stopping sending frame 
for a specified period of time designated by target device until the PAUSE time 
expires. This is accomplished by sending a PAUSE frame from target device to 
source device. When the target is not busy and the PAUSE time is expired, it will 
send another PAUSE frame with zero time-to-wait to source device. After the 
source device receives the PAUSE frame, it will again transmit frames immediately. 
PAUSE frame is identical in the form of the MAC frame with a pause-time value and 
with a special destination MAC address 01-80-C2-00-00-01. As per the specification, 
PAUSE operation can not be used to inhibit the transmission of MAC control frame. 
Normally, in 10Mbps and 100Mbps Ethernet, only symmetric flow control is 
supported. However, some switches (e.g. 24 Gigabit Web Smart Switch) support 
not only symmetric but asymmetric flow controls for the special application. In 
Gigabit Ethernet, both symmetric flow control and asymmetric flow control are 
supported. Asymmetric flow control only allows transmitting PAUSE frame in one 
way from one side, the other side is not but receipt-and-discard the flow control 
information. Symmetric flow control allows both two ports to transmit PASUE frames 
each other simultaneously. 
Inter-frame Gap time 
After the end of a transmission, if a network node is ready to transmit data 
out and if there is no carrier signal on the medium at that time, the device will wait 
for a period of time known as an inter-frame gap time to have the medium clear and 
stabilized as well as to have the jobs ready, such as adjusting buffer counter, 
updating counter and so on, in the receiver site. Once the inter-frame gap time 
expires after the de-assertion of carrier sense, the MAC transmits data. In 
IEEE802.3 specification, this is 96-bit time or more. 
Collision 
Collision happens only in half-duplex operation. When two or more network 
nodes transmit frames at approximately the same time, a collision always occurs 
and interferes with each other. This results the carrier signal distorted and un-
discriminated. MAC can afford detecting, through the physical layer, the distortion of 
the carrier signal. When a collision is detected during a frame transmission, the 
transmission will not stop immediately but, instead, continues transmitting until the 
rest bits specified by jamSize are completely transmitted. This guarantees the 
duration of collision is enough to have all involved devices able to detect the 
collision. This is referred to as Jamming. After jamming pattern is sent, MAC stops 
transmitting the rest data queued in the buffer and waits for a random period of time, 
known as backoff time with the following formula. When backoff time expires, the 
device goes back to the state of attempting to transmit frame. The backoff time is 
determined by the formula below. When the times of collision is increased, the 
backoff time is getting long until the collision times excess 16. If this happens, the 
frame will be discarded and backoff time will also be reset. 
 
 
where 
k = min (n, 10)