Tag: QoS

Control Plane Protection in Cisco IOS

CoPP – Control Plane Protection or better Control Plain Policing. It is the only option to make some sort of flood protection or QoS for traffic going to control plane.

In the router normal operation the most important traffic is control plain traffic. Control plane traffic is traffic originated on router itself by protocol services running on it, destined to other router device on the network. In order to run properly, routers need to speak with each other. They speak with each other by rules defined in protocols and protocols are running in shape of router services.

Examples for this kind of protocols are routing protocols like BGP, EIGRP, OSPF or some other non-routing protocols like CDP etc..

CoPP

Control Plane Policing is QoS applied on ingress sub-interfacess towards Route Processor

When router is making BGP neighbour adjacency with the neighbouring router, it means that both routers are running BGP protocol service on them. BGP service is generating control plane traffic, sending that traffic to BGP neighbour and receiving control plane traffic back from the neighbour.

Usage of Control Plane Protection is important on routers receiving heavy traffic of which to many packets are forwarded to Control Plane. In that case, we can filter traffic based on predefined priority classes that we are free to define based on our specific traffic pattern.