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Enabling Unidirectional Traffic Flow on Physical Interfaces

By default, physical interfaces are bidirectional; that is, they both transmit and receive traffic. You can configure unidirectional mode on a 10-Gigabit Ethernet interface that creates two new physical interfaces that are unidirectional. The new transmit-only and receive-only interfaces operate independently, but both are subordinate to the original parent interface.

The unidirectional interfaces enable the configuration of a unidirectional link topology. Unidirectional links are useful for applications such as broadband video services where almost all traffic flow is in one direction, from the provider to the user. Unidirectional mode conserves bandwidth by enabling it to be differentially dedicated to transmit and receive interfaces. In addition, unidirectional mode conserves ports for such applications because the transmit-only and receive-only interfaces act independently. Each can be connected to different routers, for example, reducing the total number of ports required.

To enable unidirectional link mode on a physical interface, include the unidirectional statement at the [edit interfaces interface-name] hierarchy level:



[edit interfaces interface-name]

unidirectional;

Note: Unidirectional mode is currently supported on only the 4x10 GE DPC on the MX960 platform.

The transmit-only interface is always operationally up. The operational status of the receive-only interface depends only on local faults; it is independent of remote faults and of the status of the transmit-only interface.

On the parent interface, you can configure attributes common to both interfaces, such as clocking, framing, gigether-options, and sonet-options. On each of the unidirectional interfaces, you can configure encapsulation, MAC address, MTU size, and logical interfaces.

Unidirectional interfaces support IP and IPv6. Packet forwarding takes place by means of static routes and static ARP entries. which you can configure independently on both unidirectional interfaces.

Only transmit statistics are reported on the transmit-only interface (and shown as zero on the receive-only interface). Only receive statistics are reported on the receive-only interface (and shown as zero on the transmit-only interface). Both transmit and receive statistics are reported on the parent interface.

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