Understanding the End-to-End Performance Impact of RED in a Heterogeneous Environment

Random Early Detection (RED) is the recommended active queue management scheme for rapid deployment throughout the Internet. As a result, there have been considerable research efforts in studying the performance of RED. However, previous studies have often focused on relatively homogeneous environment. The effects of RED in a heterogeneous environment are not thoroughly understood. In this paper, we use extensive simulations to explore the interaction between RED and various types of heterogeneity, as well as the impact of such interaction on the user-perceived end-to-end performance. Our results show that overall RED improves performance at least for the types of heterogeneity we have considered. Keywords—Random early detection (RED), explicit congestion notification (ECN), simulation, performance evaluation