Abstract

In this work, we investigate mechanisms for Internet congestion control in general, and Random Early Detection (RED) in particular. We first study the current proposals for RED implementation and identify several structural problems such as producing large traffic oscillations and introducing unnecessary overhead in the fast path forwarding. We model RED as a feedback control system and we discover fundamental laws governing the traffic dynamics in TCP/IP networks. Based on this understanding, we derive a set of recommendations for the architecture and implementation of congestion control modules in routers, such as RED. I. INTRODUCTION Congestion control for IP networks has been a recurring problem for many years. The problem of congestion collapse encountered by early TCP/IP protocols has prompted the study of end-to-end congestion control algorithms in the late 80's and proposals such as [4], which forms the basis for the TCP congestion control in current implementations. The ess...

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