interactions-between-ip-routing-and-qos.html

---
date: 2009-01-23T06:20:00.000+01:00
tags:
- CEF
- you've asked for it
- QoS
title: Interactions between IP routing and QoS
url: /2009/01/interactions-between-ip-routing-and-qos.html
---

<div class="bloggerBody"><p>One of my readers sent me an interesting question a while ago:</p>
<blockquote class="cite">I reviewed one of your blog posts "<a href="https://blog.ipspace.net/2006/12/per-destination-or-per-packet-cef-load.html">Per-Destination or Per Packet CEF Load Sharing?</a>" and wondered if you had investigated previously on how MQC QoS worked together with the CEF load-sharing algorithm (or does it interact at all)? For example, let's say I have two equal cost paths between two routers and the routing table (as well as CEF) sees both links as equal paths to the networks behind each router. On each link I have the same outbound service policy applied with a simple LLQ, BW, and a class-default queues. Does CEF check each IP flow and make sure both link's LLQ and BW queues are evenly used?</blockquote>
<p>Unfortunately, packet forwarding and QoS are completely uncoupled in Cisco IOS. CEF performs its load balancing algorithm purely on source/destination information and does not take in account the actual utilization of outbound interfaces. If you have bad luck, most of the traffic ends on one of the links and the packets that would easily fit on the other link will be dropped by the QoS mechanisms.</p>
<p>You could use multilink PPP to solve the problem in low-speed environments. With MLPPP, CEF sends the traffic to a single output interface (the <em>Multilink </em>interface) and the queuing mechanisms evenly distribute packet fragments across the links in the bundle.</p>
<p>In high-speed environments, you can only hope that the number of traffic flows traversing the links will be so high that you’ll get a good statistical distribution (which is usually the case).</p>
</div>