A self-configuring RED gateway

The congestion control mechanisms used in TCP have been the focus of numerous studies and have undergone a number of enhancements. However, even with these enhancements, TCP connections still experience alarmingly high loss rates, especially during times of congestion. To alleviate this problem, the IETF is considering active queue management mechanisms, such as random early detection (RED), for deployment in the network. In this paper, we first show that the effectiveness of RED depends, to a large extent, on the appropriate parameterization of the RED queue. We then show that there is no single set of RED parameters that work well under different congestion scenarios. In light of this observation, we propose and experiment with more adaptive RED gateways which self-parameterize themselves based on the traffic mix. The results show that traffic cognizant parameterization of RED gateways can effectively reduce packet loss, while maintaining high link utilizations under a range of network loads.