There will generally be several PVCs operating on the access link with each VC having dedicated bandwidth availability specified as the Committed Information Rate (CIR). The CIR is the rate at which the service provider agrees to accept bits on the VC.
Individual CIRs are normally less than the port speed. However, the sum of the CIRs will normally be greater than the port speed, possibly by a factor of 2 or 3. This statistical multiplexing accomodates the bursty nature of computer communications since channels are unlikely to be at their maximum data rate simultaneously.
While a frame is being transmitted, each bit will be sent at the port speed. For this reason, there must be a gap between frames on a VC if the average bit rate is to be the CIR.
Committed burst(Bc) – This is the maximum number of bits that the switch agrees to tranfer during any committed rate measurement interval.
Excess burst(Be) – This is the maximum number of uncommitted bits that the FR switch attempts to transfer beyond the CIR. Excess burst depends on the service offerings that the vendor has available, but it is typically limited to the port speed of the local access loop. This data (Be) generally is delivered with a lower probability than Bc. The network treats Be data as discard eligible.
DE – The DE bit is set on the oversubscribed traffic ( that is, the traffic that was received after the CIR was met )
The switch maintains a bit counter for each VC. An incoming frame is marked DE if it puts the counter over Bc. An incoming frame is discarded if it pushes the counter over Bc + Be. At the end of each Tc seconds the counter is reduced by Bc. The counter may not be negative, so idle time can not be saved up.