Configuring Congestion Avoidance; Overview; Wred Configuration Overview - HP 5830 Series Configuration Manual

Configuring congestion avoidance

This chapter describes how to configure congestion avoidance.

Overview

Avoiding congestion before it occurs is a proactive approach to improving network performance. As a
flow control mechanism, congestion avoidance actively monitors network resources (such as queues and
memory buffers), and drops packets when congestion is expected to occur or deteriorate.
Compared with end-to-end flow control, this flow control mechanism controls the load of more flows in a
device. When dropping packets from a source end, it cooperates with the flow control mechanism (such
as TCP flow control) at the source end to regulate the network traffic size. The combination of the local
packet drop policy and the source-end flow control mechanism helps maximize throughput and network
use efficiency and minimize packet loss and delay.
Tail drop
Congestion management techniques drop all packets arriving at a full queue. This tail drop mechanism
results in global TCP synchronization. If packets from multiple TCP connections are dropped, these TCP
connections go into the state of congestion avoidance and slow start to reduce traffic, but traffic peak
occurs later. Consequently, the network traffic jitters all the time.
RED and WRED
You can use random early detection (RED) or weighted random early detection (WRED) to avoid global
TCP synchronization.
Both RED and WRED avoid global TCP synchronization by randomly dropping packets. When the
sending rates of some TCP sessions slow down after their packets are dropped, other TCP sessions
remain at high sending rates. Link bandwidth is efficiently used because TCP sessions at high sending
rates always exist.
The RED or WRED algorithm sets an upper threshold and lower threshold for each queue and processes
the packets in a queue as follows:
When the queue size is shorter than the lower threshold, no packets are dropped.
•
When the queue size reaches the upper threshold, all subsequent packets are dropped.
•
When the queue size is between the lower threshold and the upper threshold, the received packets
•
are dropped at the user-configured drop probability.
NOTE:
Both Layer 2 and Layer 3 Ethernet interfaces support the congestion avoidance function. The term
"interface" in this chapter collectively refers to these two types of interfaces. You can use the port
link-mode command to configure an Ethernet port as a Layer 2 or Layer 3 interface (see
Switching Configuration Guide

WRED configuration overview

This section describes WRED configuration approaches and WRED parameters.
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Layer 2—LAN