How congestion control is different from flow control?
Flow control is controlled by the receiving side. It ensures that the sender only sends what the receiver can handle. Think of a situation where someone with a fast fiber connection might be sending to someone on dialup or something similar. The sender would have the ability to send packets very quickly, but that would be useless to the receiver on dial up, so they would need a way to throttle what the sending side can send. Flow control deals with the mechanisms available to ensure that this communication goes smoothly.
Congestion control is a method of ensuring that everyone across a network has a “fair” amount of access to network resources, at any given time. In a mixed-network environment, everyone needs to be able to assume the same general level of performance. A common scenario to help understand this is an office LAN. You have a number of LAN segments in an office all doing their thing within the LAN, but then they may all need to go out over a WAN link that is slower than the constituent LAN segments. Picture having 100mb connections within the LAN that ultimately go out through a 5mb WAN link. Some kind of congestion control would need to be in place there to ensure there are no issues across the greater network.
