Explicit Congestion Notification

(E-C-N)

(Adapted from RFC 2481) TCP is currently the dominant transport protocol used in the Internet. TCP uses packet drops as an indication of congestion. With the addition of active queue management (e.g., RED) to the Internet infrastructure, routers detect congestion before the queue overflows and are no longer limited to packet drops as an indication of congestion. Routers could instead set a Congestion Experienced (CE) bit in the packet header of packets from ECN-capable transport protocols.

More Information

• RFC 2481