Packet dropping

Impact of queuing discipline

There are many queuing disciplines used for determining which packets to drop. Most basic networking equipment will use FIFO queuing for packets waiting to go through the bottleneck and they will drop the packet if the queue is full at the time the packet is received. This type of packet dropping is called tail drop. Other full queue mechanisms include random early detection and weighted random early detection. Dropping packets is undesirable as the packet is either lost or must be retransmitted and this can impact real-time throughput; however, increasing the buffer size can lead to bufferbloat, which has its own impact on latency and jitter during congestion.