CoS for Subscriber Access Overview

Junos CoS enables you to divide traffic into classes and offer various levels of throughput and packet loss when congestion occurs. This functionality allows packet loss to happen according to rules that you configure. The Junos CoS features provide a set of mechanisms that you can use to provide differentiated services when best-effort traffic delivery is insufficient.

In a subscriber access environment, service providers want to provide video, voice, and data services over the same network for subscribers. Subscriber traffic is delivered from the access network, through a router, through a switched Ethernet network, to an Ethernet digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM). The DSLAM forwards the subscriber’s traffic to the residential gateway over a digital subscriber line (DSL). An MX Series router that is installed in a subscriber access network as an edge router can perform subscriber management functions that include subscriber identification and per-subscriber CoS.

In a subscriber access network, a subscriber is an authenticated user—a user that has logged in to the access network at a subscriber interface and then been verified by the configured authentication server and subsequently granted initial CoS services. Subscribers can be identified statically or dynamically. In this network, subscribers are mapped to VLANs, demux, or PPPoE interfaces.

You can configure the router to provide hierarchical scheduling or per-unit scheduling for subscribers:

• Hierarchical CoS enables you to apply traffic scheduling and queuing parameters (which can include a delay-buffer bandwidth) and packet transmission scheduling parameters (which can include buffer management parameters) to an individual subscriber interface rather than to all interfaces configured on the port. Hierarchical CoS enables you to dynamically modify queues when subscribers require services.
• Per-unit scheduling enables one set of output queues for each logical interface configured under the physical interface. In per-unit scheduling configurations, each Layer 3 scheduler node is allocated a dedicated set of queues.

Because the interface sets corresponding to VLANs using agent-circuit-identifier information are created dynamically, you can apply CoS attributes, such as shaping, at the household level. You must set and define the CoS policy for the agent-circuit-identifier virtual VLAN interface set using the dynamic profile for the agent-circuit-identifier interface set (not the subscriber profile). CoS on dynamic VLANs includes support for level 3 or level 2 scheduler nodes for a dynamic interface set. You can also configure a traffic control profile and a remaining traffic control profile for a dynamic interface set. CoS on dynamic VLANs enables you to configure a dynamic scheduler map for a traffic control profile that is used by a dynamic interface set. In this case, the dynamic scheduler map must use the unique ID format.