The committed information rate (CIR) for a meter is the long term average rate at which traffic is considered as conforming traffic or in-profile traffic. The higher the rate, the greater the expected throughput. The user is able to burst above the CIR and up to PIR for brief periods of time. The time and profile of the packet is decided based on the burst sizes, as described in the following sections.
When defining the CIR for a meter, the value specified is the administrative CIR for the meter. The 7210 SAS devices have a number of native rates in hardware that are used to determine the operational CIR for the meter. The user has some control over how the administrative CIR is converted to an operational CIR if the hardware does not support the exact CIR and PIR combination specified. See the interpretation of the administrative CIR in Adaptation rule for meters.
The CIR for meters is provisioned on service ingress and network ingress within service ingress QoS policies and network QoS policies, respectively.