Configuring Link Fragmentation and Interleaving

As it does on any other interface, priority scheduling on a multilink bundle determines the order in which an output interface transmits traffic from an output queue. The queues are serviced in a weighted round-robin fashion. But when a queue containing large packets starts using the multilink bundle, small and delay-sensitive packets must wait their turn for transmission. Because of this delay, some slow links, such as T1 and E1, can become useless for delay-sensitive traffic.

Link fragmentation and interleaving (LFI) solves this problem. It reduces delay and jitter on links by fragmenting large packets and interleaving delay-sensitive packets with the resulting smaller packets for simultaneous transmission across multiple links of a multilink bundle.

Figure 1 illustrates how LFI works. In this figure, device R0 and device R1 have LFI enabled. When device R0 receives large and small packets, such as data and voice packets, it divides them into two categories. All voice packets and any other packets configured to be treated as voice packets are categorized as LFI packets and transmitted without fragmentation or an MLPPP header. If CRTP is configured on the bundle, LFI packets are transmitted through CRTP processing. The remaining non-LFI (data) packets can be fragmented or unfragmented based on the configured fragmentation threshold. The packets larger than the fragmentation threshold are fragmented. An MLPPP header (containing a multilink sequence number) is added to all non-LFI packets, fragmented and unfragmented.

The fragmentation is performed according to the fragmentation threshold that you configure. For example, if you configure a fragmentation threshold of 128 bytes, all packets larger than 128 bytes are fragmented. When device R1 receives the packets, it sends the unfragmented voice packets immediately but buffers the packet fragments until it receives the last fragment for a packet. In this example, when device R1 receives fragment 5, it reassembles the fragments and transmits the whole packet.

The unfragmented data packets are treated as a single fragment. Thus device R1 does not buffer the unfragmented data packets and transmits them as it receives them.

Figure 1: LFI on a Services Router

To configure LFI, you define the MLPPP encapsulation type and enable fragmentation and interleaving of packets by specifying the fragmentation threshold and fragmentation maps, with a no-fragmentation knob mapped to the forwarding class of choice.

This example shows how to configure LFI.