MPLS incoming bandwidth shaping/policing

[Phil Neil]

Hi

My team manage a Telstra MPLS network with two "head offices" in regards to where the remote sites access services and pull data from.

We have outgoing shaping on the routers of these two sites main sites for every site so they do not try and pull too much traffic. The two main site routers aggregate shape average for a particular remote site equals roughly 80% of the remote sites bandwidth.

We also have outgoing shaping on the remote site routers so they do not send too much traffic.

This works quite well but we have a couple of small sites that hang off a larger site in that region so they are effectively accessing services from 3 different sites.

We are trying to work out the best way to shape traffic coming into each site and we are thinking we need to shape inbound traffic and we've been reading up on policing but aren't too sure if this is the best way. We'd like to shape inbound traffic so we don't have to allocate say a third of the bandwidth of the remote site to each of the sites that the remote site pull data from.

Even sites that only download from the head office have the ability to occasionally access a computer/server or another device off another remote site and potentially flood the link so it would be good to shape inbound traffic to prevent this.

Does anyone run a similar network and have been faced with this problem, how have you dealt with it?

I appreciate any advice!!

Regards,

Phil

[Mahesh Gohil]

Hi Phil,

First let me try to explain shaping and policing...

Poicing we normally use if we do not want excess traffic to move beyond certain point. So we can say it is good practice to use policing in inbound

direction. It is also good practice to use policing for voice traffic

why ? because it is better to drop call instead of offering bad quality.

so what is benefit of policing:   It supports marking, Less buffer usage

Now shaping generally we use at output direction when we know that site where we send traffic having low access speed and it will not able to process packets at a speed by which we are sending it.

You can use shaping for voice traffic by lowering Tc like 10ms. and

yes there are some benefit of shaping also like...It does not drop packets ,

Base on above explanation you can decide what is best suited to your network.

Regards

Mahesh