Concept Guide

Using ECN, the packets are marked for transmission at a later time after the network recovers from the heavy trac state to an optimal
load. In this manner, enhanced performance and throughput are achieved. Also, the devices can respond to congestion before a queue
overows and packets are dropped, enabling improved queue management.
When a packet reaches the device with ECN enabled for WRED, the average queue size is computed. To measure the average queue size,
a weight factor is used. This weight factor is user-congurable. You can use the wred weight number command to congure the
weight for the WRED average queue size. The mark probability value is the number of packets dropped when the average queue size
reaches the maximum threshold value.
The weight factor is set to zero by default, which causes the same behavior as dropping of packets by WRED during network loads or also
called instantaneous ECN marking. In a topology in which congestion of the network varies over time, you can specify a weight to enable a
smooth, seamless averaging of packets to handle the sudden overload of packets based on the previous time sampling performed. You can
specify the weight parameter for front-end and backplane ports separately in the range of 0 through 15.
You can enable WRED and ECN capabilities per queue for granularity. You can disable these functionality per queue, and you can also
specify the minimum and maximum buer thresholds for each color-coding of the packets. You can congure maximum drop rate
percentage of yellow and green proles. You can set up these parameters for both front-end and backplane ports.
Global Service Pools With WRED and ECN Settings
Support for global service pools is now available. You can congure global service pools that are shared buer pools accessed by multiple
queues when the minimum guaranteed buers for the queue are consumed. Two service pools are used– one for loss-based queues and
the other for lossless (priority-based ow control (PFC)) queues. You can enable WRED and ECN conguration on the global service-pools.
You can dene WRED proles and weight on each of the global service-pools for both loss-based and lossless (PFC) service- pools. The
following events occur when you congure WRED and ECN on global service-pools:
• If WRED/ECN is enabled on the global service-pool with threshold values and if it is not enabled on the queues, WRED/ECN are not
eective based on global service-pool WRED thresholds. The queue on which the trac is scheduled must contain WRED/ECN
settings, which are enabled for WRED, to be valid for that trac.
• When WRED is congured on the global service-pool (regardless of whether ECN on global service-pool is congured), and one or
more queues have WRED enabled and ECN disabled, WRED is eective for the minimum of the thresholds between the queue
threshold and the service-pool threshold.
• When WRED is congured on the global service-pool (regardless of whether ECN on global service-pool is congured), and one or
more queues are enabled with both WRED and ECN, ECN marking takes eect. The packets are ECN marked up to shared- buer
limits as determined by the shared-ratio for that global service-pool.
WRED/ECN congurations for the queues that belong to backplane ports are common to all the backplane ports and cannot be specied
separately for each backplane port granularity. This behavior occurs to prevent system-level complexities in enabling this support for
backplane ports. Also, WRED/ECN is not supported for multicast packets.
The following table describes the WRED and ECN operations that occur for various scenarios of WRED and ECN conguration on the
queue and service pool. (X denotes not-applicable in the table, 1 indicates that the setting is enabled, 0 represents a disabled setting. )
Table 63. Scenarios of WRED and ECN
Conguration
Queue Conguration Service-Pool
Conguration
WRED Threshold
Relationship
Q threshold = Q-T,
Service pool threshold =
SP-T
Expected Functionality
WRED ECN WRED ECN
0 0 X X X WRED/ECN not applicable
Quality of Service (QoS) 699