Corruption of Received Data

Device errors can result in corrupted data being placed in receive buffers. Such corruption is indistinguishable from corruption that occurs beyond the domain of the device, for example, within a network. Typically, existing software is already in place to handle such corruption. One example is the integrity checks at the transport layer of a protocol stack. Another example is integrity checks within the application that uses the device.

If the received data is not to be checked for integrity at a higher layer, the data can be integrity-checked within the driver itself. Methods of detecting corruption in received data are typically device-specific. Checksums and CRC are examples of the kinds of checks that can be done.