O switch tem uma quantidade X de RAM para receber e armazenar em buffer quadros de suas portas. Há um risco de perda de quadros se um host / nó transmitir outro quadro (para o comutador) e o comutador não puder armazenar esse novo quadro em buffer porque a memória está cheia. Isso se aplica a switches que usam store-and-forward.
Veja Limitações de buffer de comutação em tutorial de comutação de rede :
As packets are processed in the switch, they are held in buffers. If the destination segment is congested, the switch holds on to the packet as it waits for bandwidth to become available on the crowded segment. Buffers that are full present a problem. So some analysis of the buffer sizes and strategies for handling overflows is of interest for the technically inclined network designer.
In real world networks, crowded segments cause many problems, so their impact on switch consideration is not important for most users, since networks should be designed to eliminate crowded, congested segments. There are two strategies for handling full buffers. One is “backpressure flow control” which sends packets back upstream to the source nodes of packets that find a full buffer. This compares to the strategy of simply dropping the packet, and relying on the integrity features in networks to retransmit automatically. One solution spreads the problem in one segment to other segments, propagating the problem. The other solution causes retransmissions, and that resulting increase in load is not optimal. Neither strategy solves the problem, so switch vendors use large buffers and advise network managers to design switched network topologies to eliminate the source of the problem – congested segments.
De acordo com LAN Switching , o controle de fluxo pode ser empregado para reduzir a perda de quadros.
Flow control is necessary when the destination port is receiving more traffic than it can handle. Since the buffers are only meant for absorbing peaks traffic, with excessive load frames may be dropped. It is a costly operation as delay is of the order of seconds for each dropped frame.
Traditional networks do not have a layer 2 flow control mechanism, and rely mainly on higher layers for this. Switches come with various flow control strategies depending on the vendors. Some switches upon finding that the destination port is overloaded will send jam message to the sender. Since the decoding of MAC address is fast and a switch can, in very little time, respond with a jam message, collision or packet loss can be avoided. To the sender, jam packet is like a virtual collision, so it will wait a random time before retransmitting. This strategy works as only those frames that go to the overloaded destination port are jammed and not the others.
Is the switch actually the traffic cop on that trunk for purposes of collisions and whose collision domain does this wire belong to?
Desde que é qualquer mecanismo de enfileiramento que o switch emprega (por exemplo, FIFO versus QoS ) que determina a ordem dos quadros encaminhados através de cada porta, o switch pode ser considerado como um "traffic cop" . No entanto, isso não tem nada a ver com colisões ou domínios de colisão.
Does this depend on using a dedicated WAN port vs using a normal switchport for the router connection?
Os switches não têm portas WAN (embora eu tenha visto hubs com uma porta comutável para "normal" ou "uplink").