Four new tests illustrate and validate the new "gentle_" parameter added to RED. These tests can be run with the following commands: ../../ns test-suite-red.tcl ungentle ../../ns test-suite-red.tcl gentle ../../ns test-suite-red.tcl ungentleBadParams ../../ns test-suite-red.tcl gentleBadParams The "gentle_" parameter implements a suggestion from an October 1997 email on "Optimum functions for computing the drop probability" available from "http://www.aciri.org/floyd/REDfunc.txt". From the ns man page on "gentle_": Set to true to increase the packet drop rate slowly from max_p to 1 as the average queue size ranges from maxthresh to twice maxthresh. The default is set to false, and max_p increases abruptly from max_p to 1 when the average queue size exceeds maxthresh. The first two tests compare the behavior of RED with "gentle_" set to false, and to true, with the default RED parameters. There is very little difference between the two tests. The next two tests compare the behavior of RED with "gentle_" set to false, and to true, with a less-optimal setting of the RED parameters. (E.g., with "max_p" set to 0.02 instead of to 0.1.) These two tests show that with "gentle_" set to true, RED gives more robust performance with less-optimal settings of the RED parameters.