AlgoPlus//networking / go-back-n
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Go-Back-N ARQ

A sliding window pipelines frames; a loss resends everything from N onward.

Window
Delivered
Legend
Frame
ACK
Lost
Retransmission
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In a nutshell
Go-Back-N keeps the link busy by sending a whole window of frames before waiting for acknowledgements. The receiver is deliberately simple — it accepts frames only in order and discards anything that arrives early. So when one frame is lost, the sender must 'go back' and resend that frame and every frame after it, even the ones that already arrived fine. Fast when the link is clean, wasteful when it loses frames.
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Keep the pipe full with a window of frames. The receiver is dumb (in-order only), so one loss means rewinding and resending everything after it.
Key terms
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