Revisiting the Gentle Parameter of the Random Early Detection (RED) for TCP Congestion Control

—The Random Early Detection (RED) is used as an Active Queue Management (AQM) Technique for TCP congestion handling. A modification of RED called the Gentle RED (GRED) has been proposed by adding the Gentle parameter to the original implementation of RED. This parameter has been turned on by default in the NS2 simulator versions 2.1b and later; claiming that it helps in smoothing out traffic in routers and increases network performance. In this article we revisit this parameter and show, through simulation, that this parameter should be turned off in current simulations of RED using the NS2 simulator and it should be replaced by any adaptation parameter such as the Adaptive parameter in ARED.