Back-Pressure based flow control and policing mechanism for Metro Ethernet Networks

Data technologies are expanding from Local Area Networks (LANs) to Metropolitan Are Networks (MANs). Ethernet is becomming a popular choice for data transport in the metro because of it familiarity, simplicity and cost effective nature. An important aspect of providing service in the metro is the ability to support and maintain service level agreements. This in turn requires support for traffic flow control, monitoring and policing. This article presents a novel back-pressure basd traffic policing mechanism aimed at providing feedback to the end-user or access part when agreements are violated, instead of simply and directly dropping packets. The performance of this mechanism is analyzed with experiments. Results focus on effects on both TCP traffic as well as UDP multimedia traffic.