A Lower Effort Per-Hop Behavior (LE PHB)

This document specifies properties and characteristics of a Lower Effort (LE) per-hop behavior (PHB). The primary objective of this LE PHB is to protect best-effort (BE) traffic (packets forwarded with the default PHB) from LE traffic in congestion situations, i.e., when resources become scarce, best-effort traffic has precedence over LE traffic and may preempt it. There are numerous uses for this PHB, e.g., for background traffic of low precedences, such as bulk data transfers with low priority in time, non time-critical backups, larger software updates, web search engines while gathering information from web servers and so on. This document recommends a standard DSCP value for the LE PHB.