Stability Criteria of RED with TCP Traffic

This report investigates the dynamics of RED queue management in the presence of FTP and Web-like TCP reno flows for scenarios with homogeneous and heterogeneous round trip times. We systematically derive quantitative guidelines and steady state models how to set the RED-parameters as a function of the scenario parameters bottleneck-bandwidth, round-trip-time, number of TCP flows in order to avoid severe oscillation of the queuesize. We show that properly configuring RED is feasible in case of one way bulk-data TCP traffic and knowledge of the scenario parameters, although the buffer-requirements are significant. Additionally, it is investigated in detail why RED and two-way TCP bulk-data traffic necessarily have to oscillate resulting in concerns on the deployment of RED in the TCP-dominated Internet. * This work is partially sponsored by the EU IST project Aquila.