Service aware policer with efficient handling of in-profile traffic

摘要

A service aware policer considers conformance to committed parameters before considering conformance to excess parameters. Such a flexible policer, which may be considered to be concerned with two rates and three colors, may find application in IP DiffServ, Metro Ethernet, etc. In particular, the policer, given a service associated with a given received packet, uses a profile specific to the associated service, where the profile provides values for the two rates. Subsequently, a token bucket rate algorithm allows the policer to transmit the given received packet for marking with one of the three colors. The policer may operate in a Color Blind mode in which the one of three colors (green, yellow, red) already associated with a packet is not considered or a Color Aware mode in which the color already associated with a packet is considered together with the size of the packet. Advantageously, the parameters may be defined in such a way that the efficiency of handling in-profile traffic is improved for predominant service scenarios over a wide range of traffic parameters.