Bandwidth Management Through Rate Limiting

Traffic policing allows you to control the maximum rate of traffic transmitted or received on an interface. Traffic policing is often configured on interfaces at the edge of a network to limit traffic into or out of the network. In most Traffic Policing configurations, traffic that falls within the rate parameters is transmitted, whereas traffic that exceeds the parameters is dropped or transmitted with a different priority.

Packet Marking

Packet marking allows you to partition your network into multiple priority levels or classes of service (CoS). A packet is marked and these markings can be used to identify and classify traffic for downstream devices. In some cases, such as ATM Cell Loss Priority (CLP) marking or Frame Relay Discard Eligibility (DE) marking, the marking is used to classify traffic.

• Use traffic policing to set the IP precedence or DSCP values for packets entering the network. Networking devices within your network can then use the adjusted IP precedence values to determine how the traffic should be treated. For example, the Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) feature uses the IP precedence values to determine the probability that a packet will be dropped.
• Use traffic policing to assign packets to a QoS group. The router uses the QoS group to determine how to prioritize packets within the router.

Traffic can be marked without using the Traffic Policing feature. If you want to mark traffic but do not want to use Traffic Policing, see the "Marking Network Traffic" module.

Packet Prioritization for Frame Relay Frames

The Traffic Policing feature allows users to mark the Frame Relay DE bit of the Frame Relay frame. The Frame Relay DE bit is one bit and, therefore, can be set to either 0 or 1. In congested environments, frames with the DE bit set to 1 are discarded before frames with the DE bit set to 0.

Packet Prioritization for ATM Cells

The Traffic Policing feature allows users to mark the ATM CLP bit in ATM cells. The ATM CLP bit is used to prioritize packets in ATM networks. The ATM CLP bit is one bit and, therefore, can be set to either 0 or 1. In congested environments, cells with the ATM CLP bit set to 1 are discarded before cells with the ATM CLP bit set to 0.

The following configuration shows how to define a traffic class (with the class-mapcommand) and associate that traffic class with a traffic policy (with the policy-map command). Traffic policing is applied in the traffic policy. The service-policy command is then used to attach the traffic policy to the interface.

In this example, traffic policing is configured with the average rate at 8000 bits per second, the normal burst size at 1500 bytes, and the excess burst size at 4000 bytes. Packets coming into Fast Ethernet interface 0/0 are evaluated by the token bucket algorithm to analyze whether packets conform, exceed, or violate the parameters. Packets that conform are transmitted, packets that exceed are assigned a QoS group value of 4 and are transmitted, packets that violate are dropped.

Router(config)# class-map acgroup2
Router(config-cmap)# match access-group 2
Router(config-cmap)# exit
Router(config)# policy-map police
Router(config-pmap)# class acgroup2
Router(config-pmap-c)# police 8000 1500 4000 conform-action transmit exceed-action set-qos-transmit 4 violate-action drop
Router(config-pmap-c)# exit
Router(config-pmap)# exit
Router(config)# interface fastethernet 0/0
Router(config-if)# service-policy input police