Sliding Windows

Hey guys, i checked the site material and cant find anything specifically related, but sorry if i overlooked it;

I was wondering if anybody could explain the concept of 'sliding windows' for me. i understand the windowing concept of TCP.

Is a sliding window how many windows worth of data can be sent out without acknowledgment ?

Cheers!

They are very closely related. "Sliding Window" is a concept in "Windowing" and some times referred to as the same thing.

One definition, is were the receiving device can send a single acknowledgement message for multiple packets of data sent in one window. Within that acknowledgement message is information about the receiving device’s buffer size, which tells the sending device to increase or decrease the number of packets in the next transmission (this is where the "sliding" in the name comes in).

There is more to the word "slide" than what meats the eye, it seams that there are multiple different definitions. Check those References:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_Window_Protocol
www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/sliding_window.htm

Ok, so basically a sliding window is the dynamically definable amount of TCP segments that can be sent before awaiting the ACK from the recipient host?

Basically, I think they say "sliding window" because the amount of packets that can be sent without receiving an ack can very. So you "window" slides...or changes.

@skepticals - yes, that's how I understand sliding windows too.

I beleive it dynamically increases to improve performance and then when its getting overwhelemed it can back off again. Thats from memory.