Dell PowerEdge FN I/O Module Configuration Guide 9.10(0.0)

ECN is a mechanism using which network switches indicate congestion to end hosts for initiating appropriate action. End hosts uses two least significant bits of ToS to indicate that it is ECT. When intermediate network node encounters congestion, remarks ECT to CE for end host to take appropriate action. During congestion, ECN enabled packets are not subject to any kind of drops like WRED except tail drops. Though ECN & WRED are independent technologies, BRCM has made WRED a mandatory for ECN to work.

On ECN deployment, the non-ECN packets that are transmitted on the ECN-WRED enabled interface will be considered as Green packets and will be subject to the early WRED drops. Typically the TCP-acks, OAM, ICMP ping packets will be non-ECN in nature and it is not desirable for this packets getting WRED dropped.

In such a condition, it is necessary that the switch is capable to take differentiated actions for ECN/Non-ECN packets. After classifying packets to ECN/Non-ECN, marking ECN and Non-ECN packets to different color packets is performed.

Policy based ingress QOS involves the following three steps to achieve QOS:

1. Classification of incoming traffic.

2. Specify the differentiated actions for different traffic class.

3. Attach the policy-map to the interface.

Dell Networking OS support different types of match qualifiers to classify the incoming traffic.

Match qualifiers can be directly configured in the class-map command or it can be specified through one or more ACL which in turn specifies the combination of match qualifiers.

Until Release 9.3(0.0), support is available for classifying traffic based on the 6-bit DSCP field of the IPv4 packet.

As a part of this feature, the 2-bit ECN field of the IPv4 packet will also be available to be configured as one of the match qualifier. This way the entire 8-bit ToS field of the IPv4 header shall be used to classify traffic.

The Dell Networking OS Release 9.3(0.0) supports the following QOS actions in the ingress policy based QOS:

1. Rate Policing

2. Queuing

3. Marking

For the L3 Routed packets, the DSCP marking is the only marking action supported in the software. As a part of this feature, the additional marking action to set the “color” of the traffic will be provided.

Until Release 9.3(0.0), the software has the capability to qualify only on the 6-bit DSCP part of the ToS field in IPv4 Header. You can now accept and process incoming packets based on the 2-bit ECN part of the ToS field in addition to the DSCP categorization. The IPv4 ACLs (standard and Extended) are enhanced to add this qualifier. This new keyword ‘ecn’ is present for all L3 ACL types (TCP/UDP/IP/ICMP) at the level where the ‘DSCP’ qualifier is positioned in the current ACL commands.

Dell Networking OS supports the capability to contain DSCP and ECN classifiers simultaneously for the same ACL entry.

You can use the ecn keyword with the ip access-list standard, ip access-list extended, seq, and permit commands for standard and extended IPv4 ACLs to match incoming packets with the specified ECN values.

Similar to ‘dscp’ qualifier in the existing L3 ACL command, the ‘ecn’ qualifier can be used along with all other supported ACL match qualifiers such as SIP/DIP/TCP/UDP/SRC PORT/DST PORT/ ICMP.

You can now use the ‘ecn’ match qualifier along with the above TCP flag for classification.

You can now use the set-color yellow keyword with the match ip access-group command to mark the color of the traffic as ‘yellow’ would be added in the ‘match ip’ sequence of the class-map configuration.

By default, all packets are considered as ‘green’ (without the rate-policer and trust-diffserve configuration) and hence support would be provided to mark the packets as ‘yellow’ alone will be provided.

By default Dell Networking OS drops all the ‘RED’ or ‘violate’ packets.

This marking action to set the color of the packet is allowed only on the ‘match-any’ logical operator of the class-map.

This marking-action can be configured for all of the below L3 match sequence types:

• match ip access-group

• match ip dscp

• match ip precedence

• match ip vlan