
PXB 4330 E
ABM Buffer Configuration
Semiconductor Group
15
Application Note 11.98
There are two reasons for thresholds:
1. Reservation of buffer space for higher priority traffic.
E.g. a (small) portion of the total buffer can be exclusively reserved for real time traffic.
2. Protection of buffer ranges against failures.
E.g. in case a scheduler is not served due to failure of the associated PHY the buffer
space occupied by this scheduler will grow very fast and if it is not limited it would fill
the entire buffer.
There are absolute and relative thresholds (for intended usage of absolute and relative
thresholds, see
Section 1.8
, page 36). All thresholds of the global buffer (
Table 2
) are
absolute thresholds and all other thresholds like scheduler, traffic class and queue
thresholds are relative ones. The terminology absolute/relative relates to which kind of
fill level (represented by a counter) is used for the respective threshold.
Tables 3
,
4
,
5
and
6
list the thresholds with their corresponding counters. The value of an absolute
threshold relates to the zero level (fill level = 0) of the total buffer. The value of a relative
threshold doesn’t relate to a certain total buffer fill level.
Figure 3
Absolute and Relative Thresholds
As an example for an absolute threshold assume the buffer is filled beyond the absolute
threshold for a certain traffic class. Then cells from this traffic class are not accepted
even if no cell from this traffic class is contained in the buffer. Conversely consider a
traffic class which has the absolute threshold equal to the buffer size and a small relative
Global Buffer Fill Level = Total Buffer Size (e.g. 64k cells)
(
24
H
, UBMTH(upstream global buffer) or 25
H
, DBMTH(downstream global buffer
))
Global Buffer Fill Level = 0
TrafClassMax of traffic class i
e.g. 20k cells
BufNrtEPD of traffic class i
BufNrtMax of traffic class i
Zero Level
(Fill Level = 0)
Uncertainty field of EPD threshold
Maximum fill or PPD threshold
Fill Level =
e.g. 40k cells
Current fill level
of total buffer through
all nrt cells of all traffic classes,
represented by the counters
UNRTOC/DNRTOC