In Junos OS, a policer is a feature used to limit the rate of traffic flow in the network, including exception traffic sent from the Packet Forwarding Engine (PFE) to the Routing Engine (RE). Exception traffic consists of packets that cannot be processed by the PFE alone and require intervention by the RE, such as control packets or packets destined for the device itself. A policer can be configured to enforce bandwidth limits and drop or mark packets that exceed specified rate limits, thus protecting the RE from being overwhelmed by excessive exception traffic.