Overview of receive segment coalescing
When receiving data, the miniport driver, Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS), and TCP/IP must all look at each protocol data unit (PDU) header information separately. When large amounts of data are being received, a large amount of overhead is created. Receive segment coalescing (RSC) reduces this overhead by coalescing a sequence of received segments and passing them to the host TCP/IP stack in one operation, so that NDIS and TCP/IP need to only look at one header for the entire sequence.
RSC is intended to support coalescing in a way that:
Doesn't interfere with the normal operation of TCP's congestion and flow control mechanisms.
Coalesces packets without discarding information that is used by the TCP stack.
RSC-capable miniport drivers for network cards must:
Follow a standard set of rules when coalescing segments.
Provide certain out-of-band information to the host TCP/IP stack.
Related content
The following sections provide an overview of RSC.