Like the freeways built for traffic of the 1960's that now face gridlock with traffic patterns of the 1990's, the Internet now faces congestion at the more popular times of the day.
Situations arise where there are simply too many data packets.
Sometimes discarding packets is necessary. This paper compares two different proactive packet dropping methods using several traffic scenarios. Our tests use an actual implementation. By calculating the probability of packet discard for each packet the computation cost of our efficient coding of RED required between 200 to over 400 cycles per packet. Our method called DRD, gives similar TCP performance, but only requiresbetween 50 to 200 cycles per packet.