Per-Priority Flow Control (PPFC) for Enhancing Metro Ethernet QoS

This paper presents a novel scheme called per-priority flow control (PPFC) as an extension to the IEEE802.3x standard using a simple and efficient node buffer management strategy, where a physical channel was divided into several virtual channel based on the bandwidth value (QoS parameter) embedded into the IPv6 flow label field of each flow. Moreover, it investigates performance of new proposed priority PAUSE, which includes two new flexible programmable fields (predetermined pause time and priority) in order to provide granular flow control. The proposed PPFC is fair in the sense that it distributes the resources among the flows based on their priorities during congestion. Moreover it reduces the amount of buffer overflow and packet loss and it would provide an efficient use of link bandwidth with high throughput. In addition, priority PAUSE enables optimal bandwidth management of virtual channel for different IPv6 traffic priorities and it enhances the QoS in Metro Ethernet.