Traffic policing

Traffic policing supports policing the inbound traffic and the outbound traffic.

A typical application of traffic policing is to supervise the specification of traffic entering a network and limit it within a reasonable range. Another application is to "discipline" the extra traffic to prevent aggressive use of network resources by an application. For example, you can limit bandwidth for HTTP packets to less than 50% of the total. If the traffic of a session exceeds the limit, traffic policing can drop the packets or reset the IP precedence of the packets. Figure 9 shows an example of policing outbound traffic on an interface.

Traffic policing is widely used in policing traffic entering the ISP networks. It can classify the policed traffic and take predefined policing actions on each packet depending on the evaluation result:

  • Forwarding the packet if the evaluation result is "conforming."

  • Dropping the packet if the evaluation result is "excess."

  • Forwarding the packet with its precedence remarked when the evaluation result is "conforming."