Handshaking refers to communication between two nodes that establishes the parameters for continued communication.
For a given function, handshaking does the following:
In a Clock-Driven Loop, handshaking is necessary because some nodes need more than one cycle to compute valid data, but the Clock-Driven Loop requires all nodes to return data every clock cycle. To ensure the numeric accuracy of an algorithm, nodes that depend on this data must know whether the data is invalid or valid. National Instruments has established a handshaking protocol you can use with certain nodes inside a Clock-Driven Loop. This protocol involves the following terminals: