Method and device for managing transmit buffers

A method and device for managing a data buffer that stores packets for transmission. Packets are loaded into the data buffer, which is managed as a first-in-first-out (FIFO) circular queue, at the tail of the queue. Three sequence numbers index a pointer array addressing the buffer. These sequence numbers correspond to the tail of the queue, the point in the queue from which the next packet is to be transmitted and the head of the queue, corresponding to the last packet acknowledged as correctly received plus one. When a packet is negatively acknowledged, the sequence number corresponding to the next packet to be transmitted is reset to the head of the queue.