
C HAPTER
6
Per-Hop Behavior: Congestion
Avoidance and Packet Drop
Policy
A packet drop policy is a queue management algorithm that manages the packets and queue
length in a queuing system. Traditional first-in, first-out (FIFO) queue management uses a
simple tail-drop policy, which drops any packet arriving on a full queue.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is currently the dominant transport protocol used on
the Internet. This chapter discusses TCP congestion control mechanisms and how TCP
traffic reacts in a tail-drop scenario. It calls for an active queue management algorithm,
Random Early Detection (RED), that avoids network congestion by dropping ...