Quality of Service
Our Quality of Service (QoS) policy determines the priority order of packets and is tailored to the specific characteristics of different types of services and traffic.
We use only Juniper Networks equipment that has large hardware buffers (100ms) on every single port in the network regardless of its speed. This way, during short-term overloads, we can ensure that useful packets are buffered and served instead of being lost.
Main packets types, in order of
priority (highest to lowest):
- Network Control – includes all network protocols in the BIX.BG network, including BGP4 communication for Public Peering. This traffic is relatively small, but critical, so it is served with the highest priority.
- Multicast – this traffic is real-time and delay critical. It is served with a very high priority so that all packets arrive jitter-free from the Multicast sources to the Multicast receivers.
- P2P Private VLAN – this type of traffic is relatively small, and members use it for their specific purposes. It is served with high priority.
- Transparent Ethernet Interconnect – this is all traffic for this service. At the backbone, it is served with high priority so that even massive DDoS attacks do not affect it. There is no prioritization at both ends where the customer equipment is connected. Packets are received on one side in the exact same order they were sent from the other.
- Peering – Public Peering packets that are NOT classified as potential DDoS. They are served with high priority.
- DDoS – these are the packets classified as potential DDoS. They are served with the lowest priority, so when a port is overloaded and packet loss is inevitable, some of them will be dropped. The goal is to leave enough capacity to deliver the useful peering traffic.
Activation:
The Quality of Service policy applies to every single port in the BIX.BG network, including core links. Thus, members' services will not be affected even in the case of a massive DDoS attack that could overload any network connection.
Advantages
- Small, short-term port overloads will not affect your services;
- Multicast, P2P Private VLAN and Transparent Ethernet Interconnect services will not be affected even under extreme overloads from DDoS attack;
- During significant overload caused by a DDoS attack, almost all useful Peering traffic will be preserved.