Editing Network throughput (section)

===IC hardware considerations===
Computational systems have finite processing power and can drive finite current. Limited current drive capability can limit the effective signal to noise ratio for high [[capacitance]] links.

Large data loads that require processing impose data processing requirements on hardware (such as routers). For example, a gateway router supporting a populated [[class B subnet]], handling 10 × {{nowrap|100 Mbit/s}} Ethernet channels, must examine 16 bits of address to determine the destination port for each packet. This translates into 81913 packets per second (assuming maximum data payload per packet) with a table of 2^16 addresses this requires the router to be able to perform 5.368 billion lookup operations per second. In a worst-case scenario, where the payloads of each Ethernet packet are reduced to 100 bytes, this number of operations per second jumps to 520 billion. This router would require a multi-teraflop processing core to be able to handle such a load.

* [[CSMA/CD]] and [[CSMA/CA]] "backoff" waiting time and frame retransmissions after detected collisions. This may occur in Ethernet bus networks and hub networks, as well as in wireless networks.
* [[flow control (data)|Flow control]], for example in the [[Transmission Control Protocol]] (TCP) protocol, affects the throughput if the [[bandwidth-delay product]] is larger than the TCP window, i.e., the buffer size. In that case, the sending computer must wait for acknowledgement of the data packets before it can send more packets.
* TCP [[congestion avoidance]] controls the data rate. A so-called "slow start" occurs in the beginning of a file transfer, and after packet drops caused by router congestion or bit errors in for example wireless links.