In modern network systems, efficient congestion management and data flow control are crucial to maintain high-performance levels, especially in data centers and cloud environments. PFC (Priority Flow Control) and ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) are two complementary mechanisms that help manage traffic and congestion, while gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) facilitates real-time communication and reporting between network components.

PFC and ECN work together to handle congestion in a network. PFC ensures that critical traffic continues to flow by pausing lower-priority traffic, while ECN marks packets to indicate congestion. This cooperation minimizes packet loss and optimizes network performance.

As PFC and ECN manage traffic, they generate valuable statistics such as the number of paused frames (PFC) and the number of ECN-marked packets. These statistics are essential for understanding network health and congestion levels.

gRPC is used to gather and transmit these statistics to a central server. Because gRPC is designed for high-performance, low-latency communication, it is well-suited to handle the real-time transmission of PFC and ECN data. The statistical data can be analyzed to adjust network policies, improve performance, and prevent future congestion.

PFC and ECN Statistics

PFC and ECN, in conjunction with gRPC, can provide PFC pause frame counts, PFC deadlock monitoring and ECN-marked packet counts for statistical queries.

The statistics that PFC supports reporting include:

• Number of PFC pause frames sent

• Number of PFC pause frames received

• Number of PFC deadlock monitoring instances

• Number of PFC deadlock recovery instances

• Rate of PFC pause frames received

• Rate of PFC pause frames sent

The statistics that ECN supports reporting include:

• Number of ECN marked packets

• Rate of ECN marked packets

Configuration Procedure

1. Configure PFC on your network devices. Refer to Configuring Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) for details about how to configure PFC.

2. Enable ECN to help manage congestion. Refer to Configuring Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) for details about how to enable ECN.

3. Deploy gRPC servers and clients to handle the statistical query requests. Refer to Configuring gNMI-gRPC Based Telemetry Technology for details about how to deploy gRPC.

This setup ensures you have real-time monitoring and statistical analysis capabilities for PFC and ECN, which can significantly aid in preventing network performance issues due to congestion and deadlocks.