Avoiding Network Congestion
Heterogeneous networks include different protocols used by applications, giving rise to the need to prioritize traffic in order to satisfy time-critical applications while still addressing the needs of less time-dependent applications, such as file transfer. If your network is designed to support different traffic types that share a single data path between devices in a network, implementing congestion avoidance mechanisms ensures fair treatment across the various traffic types and avoids congestion at common network bottlenecks. Congestion avoidance mechanism is achieved through packet dropping.
Random Early Detection (RED) is a commonly used congestion avoidance mechanism in a network.