Flood control (communications)

This article is about communications protocol. For water floods, see Flood control.

In communications, flood control is a feature of many communication protocols designed to prevent overwhelming of a destination receiver.[1] Such controls can be implemented either in software or in hardware, and will often request that the message be resent after the receiver has finished processing.

Internet forums often use a flood control mechanism to prevent too many messages from being posted at once, either to prevent spamming or denial-of-service attacks. Internet Relay Chat servers will often quit users performing IRC floods with an "Excess Flood" message.

References

1. Mirkovic, Jelena; Robinson, Max; Reiher, Peter; Oikonomou, George (January 2005). Distributed Defense Against DDOS Attacks (Report). Research Gate. Retrieved February 12, 2024.