Serial.available() function for Arduino

It reports the difference between the head and the tail of the circular buffer the incoming characters are stored in.

The way serial reception on the Arduino works is:

1. A character is received into the internal hardware RX buffer (UDRx)
2. An interrupt is triggered
3. An interrupt service routine (ISR) is executed
4. The character in UDRx is read and, if there is room, stored in a circular buffer (_rx_buffer).
5. The head pointer of _rx_buffer is incremented and wrapped if needed.

When you actually read a character with Serial.read() the following happens:

1. If the head and tail of rx_buffer are equal, return -1
2. Get the character at tail from _rx_buffer
3. Increment tail and wrap if needed
4. Return the character

So when you use Serial.available() it just returns head - tail (taking into account the wrapping, so the sum is slightly more complex than a simple subtraction).

You should examine the files HardwareSerial.h and HardwareSerial.cpp in the Ardino AVR core software.