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How many Packets per Second per port are needed to achieve Wire- User ID (e.g. pat@abc.net)
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SUMMARY:
When evaluating or measuring an Ethernet device's (switches, routers, firewalls) performance capabilities, the main
indicator that most will consider is the raw bandwidth that the device backplane can provide.
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However it is also important to make sure that the device has the capacity or the ability to switch/route as many packets
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as required to achieve wire rate performance. This metric is called the Packets per Second or PPS for short.
This article details how to calculate how many packets per second processing capabilities is required from a port to Ask
achieve wire-rate performance.
PROBLEM OR GOAL:
We need to see how much space each packet will occupy so we will look at theframe size in which the smallest packet Create a Support Case
will be encapsulated, as well as the inter-frame gap, and the preamble since they occupy space in between frames.
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this article we will only look at the standards based method which is the IEEE 802.1q.
The IEEE 802.1q standard states that Ethernet ports in trunk mode will insert a 32bit field between the Source MAC
address and the Type field. Consequently our minimum frame will have the following appearance on the wire:
The above table is shown below with the values recalculated for 802.1Q tagged packets.
Q-in-Q
An amendment to the 802.1Q standard is the 802.1ad or otherwise known as Q-in-Q. The purpose of this amendment
was to create a method for users to run their own VLANs inside the VLANs offered by a Metro Ethernet Service Provider.
To achieve this goal a second tag is inserted in the Ethernet frame to distinguish the customer VLANs as shown below:
As it is becoming readily noticeable, the more information we encode in the packet the more the maximum number of
packets per second limit drops for each wire speed.
MPLS
Another Ethernet technology which alters the frame on the wire is Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS). MPLS operates
between Layers 2 and 3 of the OSI model and is frequently referred to as a Layer 2.5 protocol. MPLS works by prefixing
packets with an MPLS header, containing one or more 'labels'. These labels are used for deciding where the traffic will go
to next in the network. Each label is 32 bits in length.
MPLS labels can be stacked in one frame to allow more flexibility in MPLS packet handling. From the frame point of view,
our PPS calculation will depend on how many labels are stacked in the frame. The maximum number of labels that can
be placed on one frame depends on factors affecting the processing of the frame such as MTU size for that segment and
the capability of the device to process frames with that amount of labels in them.
For our example we will look at a packet with 3 labels placed in it:
of the frame on the wire will be 96 bytes. The formula for calculating wire packets per second should be apparent by now
and it will result in the following speeds for the 3 label example shown above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_speed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interframe_gap
http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/users/gorry/course/lan-pages/mac.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1Q
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1ad-2005
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3032.txt
PURPOSE:
Specifications
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