Random Early Detection

Random early detection (RED), also known as random early discard or random early drop is a queueing discipline for a network scheduler suited for congestion avoidance.

In the conventional tail drop algorithm, a router or other network component buffers as many packets as it can, and simply drops the ones it cannot buffer. If buffers are constantly full, the network is congested. Tail drop distributes buffer space unfairly among traffic flows. Tail drop can also lead to TCP global synchronization as all connections "hold back" simultaneously, and then step forward simultaneously. Networks become under-utilized and flooded by turns. RED addresses these issues.

RED monitors the average queue size and drops (or marks when used in conjunction with ECN) packets based on statistical probabilities. If the buffer is almost empty, then all incoming packets are accepted. As the queue grows, the probability for dropping an incoming packet grows too. When the buffer is full, the probability has reached 1 and all incoming packets are dropped.

RED is more fair than tail drop, in the sense that it does not possess a bias against bursty traffic that uses only a small portion of the bandwidth. The more a host transmits, the more likely it is that its packets are dropped as the probability of a host's packet being dropped is proportional to the amount of data it has in a queue. Early detection helps avoid TCP global synchronization.

According to Van Jacobson, "there are not one, but two bugs in classic RED." Improvements to the algorithm were developed, and a draft paper was prepared, but the paper was never published, and the improvements were not widely disseminated or implemented. There has been some work in trying to finish off the research and fix the bugs.

Pure RED does not accommodate quality of service (QoS) differentiation. Weighted RED (WRED) and RED with In and Out (RIO) provide early detection with QoS considerations.

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