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Quality of Service

aliases:

  • QoS

A traffic shaping mechanism that allows for fine-grained control over traffic parameters in a network.

QoS is mostly known for being used to prioritize telecommunications protocol for better performance when on audio/video calling sessions. However, it allows for greater control using special protocols.

For example, if a network link is congested, Differentiated Service Framework and IEEE-802.1p can't reach it, but QoS can, using something like MLPS with QoS functionality. This will reserve the required bandwidth and predetermine needed stats like acceptable packet loss and max latency and jitter.

Quality of Service systems operate in three different fields:

  • Control Plane - Logic
  • Data Plane - Action
  • Management - Monitoring

Traffic Shapers

Protocols, appliances, or software programs that can work in the fields of QoS are called traffic shapers. Traffic shapers help to efficiently use the available network resources to extract maximum bandwidth. They can delay certain types of packets based on their content to ensure that higher-priority ones go first. In times of high traffic and limited bandwidth, traffic shapers can store packets until there is some bandwidth free. Other times, using traffic policing, packets can simply be dropped when it reaches a configured threshold using a dropping algorithm, like RED.

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