Monitoring, detecting, and taking action on degraded physical Ethernet links to minimize packet loss

You can monitor physical link degradation (indicated by bit error rate (BER) threshold levels) on Ethernet interfaces, and take corrective actions if the BER threshold value drops to a value in the range of 10-13 to 10-5. Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols support the monitoring of physical link degradation. An Ethernet link also supports monitoring of physical link degradation through the Link Fault Signaling (LFS) protocol. However, for both of these monitoring mechanisms, the BER threshold value range of 10-13 to 10-5 is very low. Because of the low BER threshold value, the physical link degradation goes undetected, causing disruption and packet loss on an Ethernet link.