Bandwidth Management

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Unit: 8 Lesson: 6

I NEED MORE LANES ON THE INTERSTATE

Latency and jitter are hard to control and predict due to the number of involved parties that influence. However, on local networks, delay is either caused by congestion or contention.

Congestion

When the network infrastructure can't keep up with the current demand and begins to queue and/or drop packets.

Contention

The ratio between demand for a service and the service's available capacity. Network administrators accommodate for a set contention ratio. For example, if 100 videoconferencing hosts each require 10 Mbps and they share a 1 Gbps link, the contention ratio is 1:1. If there are 200 handsets, the ratio is 2:1. Even though you don't expect 200 hosts to use the videoconferencing service at the same time, you can still cheap out and get accept the 2:1 ratio.

Unacceptable levels of congestion or contention can be managed with better hardware, faster switches and routers, or using a bandwidth management mechanism like Differentiated-Service-Framework or 802.1p.

#Netplus