Store and forward

phraseStandard termTelecom & IT

A routing technique where an entire message or packet is received and verified before being transmitted to the next node.

A data transmission method in which intermediate nodes buffer an entire frame or message, check it for errors, and then queue it for the next hop. It guarantees data integrity at each step by dropping corrupted packets, at the cost of higher latency. It is heavily used in email systems, message queues, and traditional network switches.

Heard on the job

The switch uses store and forward, so a bad CRC will get dropped right at the ingress port.