| 摘要 |
A method and apparatus provides improved flow control on a switched CSMA/CD network where the network implements the BLAM protocol by taking advantage of the fact that a switch on the network may trigger a node to transmit immediately when buffer space becomes available. In such case, the switch then sends a packet to a port that it was previously holding off with collisions, where the packet may be self-addressed or may sent to a null address so that it is not received by any node attached to that port. Such transmission then causes a backoff to be reset to zero, and the node begins transmitting immediately. Alternatively, where a switch has been holding off several ports, it is possible to allow trigger packets from each port in turn as buffer space becomes available.
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