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How many Packets per Second per port are needed to achieve Wire-Speed?
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SUMMARY:

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When evaluating or measuring an Ethernet device's (switches, routers, firewalls) performance capabilities, the main
indicator that most will consider is the raw bandwidth that the device backplane can provide.

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However it is also important to make sure that the device has the capacity or the ability to switch/route as many packets as
required to achieve wire rate performance. This metric is called the Packets per Second or PPS for short.
This article details how to calculate how many packets per second processing capabilities is required from a port to
achieve wire-rate performance.

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Note: This article focuses on Ethernet; other mediums such as ATM will have other considerations for calculating PPS.
To calculate the amount of packets per second a port must be able to handle to achieve wire-rate performance we need to
take into consideration the fact that the IP protocol allows for variable payload sizes which in turn plays a part in our PPS
calculation.
The smaller the packet passing on the wire the more packets that need to be switched to achieve wire-rate performance;
while on the other hand, larger packets will require less PPS throughput to achieve wire-rate. As such to calculate how
many PPS needed to achieve wire-speed we need only be concerned with small packet sizes since they will be the most
taxing for the switch and will yield the larger PPS number. Naturally we will assume that no collisions occur on the medium.
We need to see how much space each packet will occupy so we will look at the frame size in which the smallest packet
will be encapsulated, as well as the inter-frame gap, and the preamble since they occupy space in between frames.

Figure 1: Space Occupied by the smallest packet

As seen in figure 1, a packet will occupy at least 84 bytes on the wire. So taking the example of a 1G port we first have to
convert the speed into bytes:
1Gbps = 1,000,000,000 bits/s = (1,000,000,000 bits/s) / (8 bits/byte)= 125,000,000
bytes/s
Then we can calculate how many packets per second need to be processed if the port is to transmit at wire speed:
PPS = (125,000,000 bytes/s) / (84 bytes/packet) = 1,488,095 pps.
Similarly this same calculation can be extended to different port speeds:

Table 1: PPS Calculation

From the above table we see how many packets per second an Ethernet device must be able to handle per port in order to
achieve wire speed. The above calculation however does not take into consideration additional tags that might be available
in an Ethernet frame such as VLAN tags or MPLS labels. These will be covered in the following sections.
VLAN Tags
VLAN Tagging or Trunking is used to carry multiple VLANs over one physical wire. To do so we need a distinguisher for the
different VLANs traversing the link. There are multiple methods to perform the VLAN identification but for the scope of this
article we will only look at the standards based method which is the IEEE 802.1q.
The IEEE 802.1q standard states that Ethernet ports in trunk mode will insert a 32bit field between the Source MAC
address and the Type field. Consequently our minimum frame will have the following appearance on the wire:

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Figure 2: 802.1Q tagged minimum frame

As we can see the minimum frame has increased in size by 4 bytes. Lets examine how this will affect the calculations we
have performed above since the minimum space that a frame will occupy has increased from 84 bytes to 88 bytes while
taking the wire speed of 1Gbps as an example:
1Gbps = 1,000,000,000 bits/s = (1,000,000,000 bits/s) / (8 bits/byte)= 125,000,000
bytes/s
PPS = (125,000,000 bytes/s) / (88 bytes/packet) = 1,420,454 pps.
From the above calculation, it is apparent that the amount of packets that the wire can pass per second has decreased
slightly. This is to be expected since the wire now has to carry more information for every packet processed.
The above table is shown below with the values recalculated for 802.1Q tagged packets.

Table 2: PPS Calculation (802.1Q)

It is worth noting that within the 802.1Q standard, there is a concept of a Native VLAN. This means that dot1Q will not tag
the frame egressing the trunk port for one select VLAN. For these particular frames, the first calculation will apply since
they do not contain the dot1Q tag.
Q-in-Q
An amendment to the 802.1Q standard is the 802.1ad or otherwise known as Q-in-Q. The purpose of this amendment was
to create a method for users to run their own VLANs inside the VLANs offered by a Metro Ethernet Service Provider. To
achieve this goal a second tag is inserted in the Ethernet frame to distinguish the customer VLANs as shown below:

Figure 3: 802.1ad tagged frame

For the purposes of our calculation this second tag will increase the space a single frame will occupy by another 4 bytes.
As such the smallest frame size will increase again from 88 bytes to 92 bytes total. Therefore our speeds/PPS table will
look as follows:

Table 3: PPS Calculation (802.1ad)

As it is becoming readily noticeable, the more information we encode in the packet the more the maximum number of
packets per second limit drops for each wire speed.
MPLS
Another Ethernet technology which alters the frame on the wire is Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS). MPLS operates
between Layers 2 and 3 of the OSI model and is frequently referred to as a Layer 2.5 protocol. MPLS works by prefixing
packets with an MPLS header, containing one or more 'labels'. These labels are used for deciding where the traffic will go
to next in the network. Each label is 32 bits in length.
MPLS labels can be stacked in one frame to allow more flexibility in MPLS packet handling. From the frame point of view,
our PPS calculation will depend on how many labels are stacked in the frame. The maximum number of labels that can be
placed on one frame depends on factors affecting the processing of the frame such as MTU size for that segment and the
capability of the device to process frames with that amount of labels in them.
For our example we will look at a packet with 3 labels placed in it:

Figure 4: MPLS tagged frame

As you can see, each label will occupy 4 more bytes of space on our wire. As such for the 3 label example the total size of
the frame on the wire will be 96 bytes. The formula for calculating wire packets per second should be apparent by now and
it will result in the following speeds for the 3 label example shown above:

Table 4: PPS for a 3 label MPLS packet

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_speed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interframe_gap
http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/users/gorry/course/lan-pages/mac.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1Q
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1ad-2005
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3032.txt

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