Résumé
The aim of this paper is to study the interaction of a forward error correction (FEC) code combined with the queue management schemes like Drop Tail (DT) and RED. Since RED spreads randomly packet drops, it reduces consecutive losses. This property makes RED compatible a priori with the use of FEC at the packet level.We show, through simulations, that FEC combined with RED may indeed be more efficient than FEC combined with DT. This however depends on several parameters like the number of TCP flows that constitute the background traffic, the FEC block size and the amount of redundancy in a FEC block. We conclude generally that using FEC is more efficient with RED than with DT when the loss rate is small, and a relatively important amount of redundancy and at most a moderate FEC block size is used. On the other hand, the use of DT is more efficient for larger loss rates.