The MPLS WG Archive

[Kireeti Kompella <kireeti@juniper.net>]

While we are on the subject of overbooking, let me point out two
things:
   a) it makes sense to traffic engineer best effort IP traffic,
      and assign it a bandwidth parameter (a point that I believe
      Curtis mentioned, but I'm speaking from memory);
   b) persistent overbooking is fairly common.
(a) is a common reason for (b).

One scenario for (b) is where you have bursty traffic (happens a
lot with IP): say that some traffic trunk averages 40Mbps, but peaks
to 70Mbps.  You could put two of these on a 100Mbps link, and most
of the time, you are just fine.  If the two trunks peak at the same
time, you have some dropped traffic, but on the whole, you come out
ahead (modulo the SLAs with your customers).

You may not want to do this with your Gold customers, but for best
effort IP, this should work just fine.

Kireeti.