RED takes advantage of TCP's congestion control mechanism. By randomly dropping packets prior to periods of high congestion, RED tells the packet source to decrease its transmission rate. Assuming the packet source is using TCP, it will decrease its transmission rate until all the packets reach their destination, indicating that the congestion is cleared. You can use RED as a way to cause TCP to slow down transmission of packets. TCP not only pauses, but it also restarts quickly and adapts its transmission rate to the rate that the network can support.
RED distributes losses in time and maintains normally low queue depth while absorbing spikes.
When enabled on an interface, RED begins dropping packets when congestion occurs at a rate you select during configuration. The packet drop probability is based on the minimum threshold, maximum threshold, and mark probability denominator. When the average queue depth is above the minimum threshold, RED starts dropping packets. The rate of packet drop increases linearly as the average queue size increases until the average queue size reaches the maximum threshold. The mark probability denominator is the fraction of packets dropped when the average queue depth is at the maximum threshold.