Feature Description (IP Hard Pipe)

IP hard pipe establishes a hard pipe stratum on routers and metro Ethernet devices to carry leased line services of high-value customers, reserving bandwidth and ensuring low delay for hard pipe services. IP hard pipe strictly isolates soft and hard pipes by hardware so that the soft and hard pipes have isolated bandwidth. The soft and hard pipe priorities are also strictly isolated, and soft and hard pipe traffic cannot be scheduled together. Hard-pipe packets are forwarded with the highest priority on the public network.

IP hard pipe applies to IP leased line access scenarios of high-value customers. In the IP hard pipe solution, the U2000 is used to manage network-wide bandwidth resources and provision and maintain services. The physical interface bandwidth on the public network is separately allocated to hard and soft pipes. For example, on a 10G Ethernet interface, 2 Gbit/s bandwidth is allocated to the hard pipe, and the remaining 8 Gbit/s is allocated to the soft pipe. The hard and soft pipe bandwidths are isolated and cannot be preempted.

Figure 1-1 IP hard pipe networking

Figure 1-2 Layered IP hard pipe service

Benefits

As carrier networks are evolving to all IP, a large number of delay-sensitive leased line services of high-value customers are being migrated to the IP networks. However, the legacy IP network devices use statistical multiplexing of physical bandwidth, and the IP network traffic model is complex. In the case of traffic congestion and bursts, the delay may fail to meet the requirement. The legacy SDH network can provide high-quality leased line services, but it requires a large investment, reserves network resources for dedicated use, and is not easy to expand. If SDH and IP networks are both used, the OPEX is increased, and resources are wasted.

IP hard pipe is an IP-network-based access technology that provides bandwidth guarantee and low delay as well as service-specific granular OAM and SLA monitoring, allowing the IP networks to provide leased line access services through high-quality independent pipes. IP hard pipe allows high-value customers to rapidly migrate from legacy leased lines to IP leased lines.

GUI-based Implementation

To access IP hard pipe management, choose Service > Hard Stratum from the main menu.

Bandwidth Guarantee on Public Network Interfaces

On a hard pipe network, link bandwidth of each node is divided and allocated to hard and soft pipes. Hard-pipe bandwidth for leased line services is reserved on each node, and the hard pipe and soft pipe services are physically isolated. Figure 1-25 shows the hard pipe traffic model.

Figure 1-25 Hard-pipe bandwidth reservation

HQoS is used to establish two scheduling branches for hard pipe and soft-pipe services respectively on public network interfaces. The two scheduling branches limit the maximum bandwidth of hard pipe and soft-pipe services, implementing service isolation. Hard-pipe traffic must have low delay and no packet loss, and be isolated from soft-pipe traffic.

On the network shown in Figure 1-26, bandwidth limitation is applied to the hard pipe virtual interface (VI) and soft-pipe VI. The hard pipe VI traffic is preferentially scheduled on the physical interface, ensuring guaranteed bandwidth and low delay.

Figure 1-26 HQoS scheduling for hard pipe traffic

The hard pipe VI bandwidth is configured using the qos hard-pipe bandwidth command in the interface view. If the actual hard pipe service traffic exceeds 95% of the hard pipes processing capability, a traffic-threshold-crossing alert is generated. If the traffic exceeds 98% of the hard pipes processing capability, a traffic-threshold-crossing alarm is generated. If the traffic falls below 90% of the hard pipes processing capability, the alarm is cleared.

Bandwidth Guarantee on AC Interfaces

User-specific bandwidth limitation is implemented using interface-based HQoS, which schedules user services based on priorities. If the access user service bandwidth reaches the maximum leased line bandwidth, high-priority user packets are preferentially forwarded. When you configure HQoS on AC interfaces to limit user bandwidth, perform bandwidth limitation on the traffic and map all eight priorities of incoming traffic to CS7 (highest priority) to ensure that hard pipe services are scheduled with the highest priority on the switching fabric. If an AC interface is shared by hard pipe and non-hard-pipe services, network-to-user traffic may be congested in the downstream direction. To prevent downstream traffic congestion, configure a physical interface to be exclusive to hard pipe leased lines during network planning. If hard pipe and non-hard-pipe services must share an AC interface, use a hard-pipe-capable TM subcard on the AC side to ensure that hard pipe services are preferentially scheduled.

For more inforamtion, see the attachment document.