Effect of different packet sizes on RED performance

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We consider the adaptation of random early detection (RED) as an active queue management algorithm for TCP traffic in Internet gateways where different maximum transfer units (MTUs) are used. We studied the two existing RED variants and point out a weakness in both. The first variant where the drop probability is independent from the packet size discriminates connections with smaller MTUs. The second variant results in a very high Packet Loss Ratio (PLR), and as a consequence low goodput, for connections with higher MTUs. We show that fairness in terms of loss and goodput can be supplied through an appropriate setting of the RED algorithm.