Bandwidth Management for Downstream Traffic in Edge Networks Overview
In a subscriber access network, traffic with different encapsulations can be passed downstream to other customer premise equipment (CPE) through the MX Series router. Managing the bandwidth of downstream ATM traffic to Ethernet interfaces can be especially difficult because of the different Layer 2 encapsulations.
The downstream network is not necessarily the directly attached network. In typical broadband network gateway (BNG) configurations, the directly attached network is an Ethernet access network, which provides access to either another frame-based network, or a cell-based network.
The overhead accounting feature enables you to shape traffic based on whether the downstream network is a frame-based network, like Ethernet, or a cell-based network, like ATM. It assigns a byte adjustment value to account for different encapsulations.
This feature is available on MIC and MPC interfaces.
Effective Shaping Rate
The shaping-rate, also known as peak information rate (PIR), is the maximum rate for a scheduler node or queue.
The true rate of a subscriber at the access-loop/CPE is a function of:
The shaping-rate in effect for the subscriber’s household, in bits per second.
Whether the subscriber is connected to a frame-based or cell-based network.
Number of bytes in each frame that are accounted for by the shaper.
Chassis egress-shaping-overhead is not included in the effective
rate. Egress-shaping-overhead accounts for the physical
interface overhead (ISO OSI Layer 1). Effective shaping-rate is a
Layer 2 (ISO OSI) rate.
Shaping Modes
There are two modes used for adjusting downstream traffic:
Frame shaping mode is useful for adjusting downstream traffic with different encapsulations. Shaping is based on the number of bytes in the frame, without regard to cell encapsulation or padding overhead. Frame is the default shaping mode on the router.
Cell shaping mode is useful for adjusting downstream cell-based traffic. In cell shaping mode, shaping is based on the number of bytes in cells, and accounts for the cell encapsulation and padding overhead.
When you specify cell mode, the resulting traffic stream conforms to the policing rates configured in downstream ATM switches, reducing the number of packet drops in the Ethernet network.
To account for ATM segmentation, the router adjusts all of the rates by 48/53 to account for 5-byte ATM AAL5 encapsulation. In addition, the router accounts for cell padding, and internally adjusts each frame by 8 bytes to account for the ATM trailer.
Byte Adjustments
When the downstream traffic has different byte sizes per encapsulation, it is useful to configure a byte adjustment value to adjust the number of bytes per packet to be included in or excluded from the shaping mechanism. This value represents the number of bytes that are encapsulated and decapsulated by the downstream equipment. For example, to properly account for a 4-byte header stripped by the downstream network, set the overhead-accounting bytes to -4. To properly account for a 12-byte header added by the downstream network, set the overhead-accounting bytes to 12.
We recommend that you specify a byte adjustment value that represents the difference between the CPE protocol overhead and B-RAS protocol overhead.
The system rounds up the byte adjustment value to the nearest multiple of 4. For example, a value of 6 is rounded to 8, and a value of –10 is rounded to –8.
You do not need to configure a byte adjustment value to account for the downstream ATM network. However, you can specify the byte value to account for additional encapsulations or decapsulations in the downstream network.
Relationship with Other CoS Features
Enabling the overhead accounting feature affects the resulting shaping rates, guaranteed rate, and excess rate parameters, if they are configured.
The overhead accounting feature also affects the egress shaping overhead feature that you can configure at the chassis level. We recommend that you use the egress shaping-overhead feature to account for the Layer 2 overhead of the outgoing interface, and use the overhead-accounting feature to account for downstream traffic with different encapsulations and cell-based networks.
When both features are configured, the total byte adjustment value is equal to the adjusted value of the overhead-accounting feature plus the value of the egress-shaping-overhead feature. For example, if the configured byte adjustment value is 40, and the router internally adjusts the size of each frame by 8, the adjusted overhead accounting value is 48. That value is added to the egress shaping overhead of 24 for a total byte adjustment value of 72.