Cisco IOS™ 12.0 Quality of Service

Chapter 9. Congestion Avoidance Overview

Congestion avoidance techniques monitor network traffic loads in an effort to anticipate and avoid congestion at common network bottlenecks. Congestion avoidance is achieved through packet dropping. Among the more commonly used congestion avoidance mechanisms is Random Early Detection (RED), which is optimum for high-speed transit networks. Cisco IOS quality of service (QoS) includes an implementation of RED that, when configured, controls when the router drops packets. If you do not configure Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED), the router uses the cruder default packet drop mechanism called tail drop.

Note

For an explanation of network congestion, see the Introduction, "Quality of Service Overview." ...