The traffic involved in Layer 2 traffic suppression includes broadcast, multicast, and unknown unicast traffic.
Traffic on a Layer 2 network is classified into the following types:
Unicast traffic: consists of packets that have known destination MAC addresses in the MAC table. The NetEngine 8000 F forwards these packets based on the mappings in the MAC table.
Unknown unicast traffic: consists of packets that have destination MAC addresses that are not in the MAC table. The NetEngine 8000 F broadcasts these packets.
Multicast traffic: consists of packets that have known multicast destination MAC addresses in the MAC table. The NetEngine 8000 F broadcasts these packets based on the mappings in the MAC table.
Unknown multicast traffic: consists of packets that have destination MAC addresses that are not in the MAC table. The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) snooping-enabled NetEngine 8000 F broadcasts these packets.
Broadcast traffic: consists of packets that have broadcast destination MAC addresses. The NetEngine 8000 F broadcasts these packets.
To ensure the forwarding of unicast traffic, you can limit the bandwidth for forwarding the unknown unicast traffic, multicast traffic, and broadcast traffic by configuring traffic suppression.
If the broadcast traffic is not suppressed, a great amount of network bandwidth is consumed when a great deal of broadcast traffic flows through the network. The network performance is degraded, even interrupting the communication.
In such a case, you need to configure broadcast traffic suppression on the switch to ensure that the NetEngine 8000 F can reserve some bandwidth for forwarding unicast traffic when broadcast traffic bursts across the network.