Tightening of cell discarding method in RED for improving TCP over ATM network

TCP suffers from low performance over Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks. This is mainly because during the phase of congestion, ATM drops cells without taking into account the effect this has on the upper layer protocols. We propose an enhancement of the cell discarding method in the RED algorithm supporting TCP over ATM traffic with an UBR service. We call this method TCD-RED (tightening of cell discarding). The proposed method uses the advantage of RED to keep the average queue size as low as possible. The TCD method is optimal for discarding cells in a TCP over ATM network to overcome shortcomings of RED. We propose a TCD-RED that improves TCP performance dramatically on congested networks and guarantees fairness among multiple connections.