Data-driven intelligent networking systems and methods are provided. The system can accommodate dynamic traffic with fast, effective flow control of individual applications and traffic flows in conjunction with an end host. The system can maintain state information of individual packet flows, which can be set up or released dynamically based on injected data. Each flow can be provided with a flow-specific input queue upon arriving at a switch. Packets of a respective flow can be acknowledged after reaching the egress point of the network, and the acknowledgement packets can be sent back to the ingress point of the flow along the same data path. As a result, an ingress edge switch can perform fine grain flow control of individual sources of the flows residing on an end host.