Chapter 7:

QoS Concepts
Quality-of-Service (QoS)
 QoS is the concept for specifying how “good” the offered services are.
 Quality of Service (QoS) is a set of techniques and technologies that are designed to
optimize the performance of an organization’s network.
 Quality of service is a concept based on the statement that not all applications need the
same performance from the system/network over which they run.
 Thus, applications may indicate their specific requirements to the network, including
cost, before they actually start transmitting data.
 Quality of service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications,
users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow.
 Quality of Service (QoS) is a way to tell routers and switches to prefer, process and
prioritize some packets over others.
How Does QoS Work?
 QoS networking technology works by marking packets to identify service types,
then configuring routers to create separate virtual queues for each application, based
on their priority. As a result, bandwidth is reserved for critical applications or
websites that have been assigned priority access.
 QoS technologies provide capacity and handling allocation to specific flows in
network traffic. This enables the network administrator to assign the order in which
packets are handled and provide the appropriate amount of bandwidth to each
application or traffic flow.
Advantages of QoS
The deployment of QoS is crucial for businesses that want to ensure the availability of their
business-critical applications. It is vital for delivering differentiated bandwidth and ensuring
data transmission takes place without interrupting traffic flow or causing packet losses.
Major advantages of deploying QoS include:
 Unlimited application prioritization: QoS guarantees that businesses’ most mission-
critical applications will always have priority and the necessary resources to achieve high
performance.
 Better resource management: QoS enables administrators to better manage the
organization’s internet resources. This also reduces costs and the need for investments in
link expansions.
 Enhanced user experience: The end goal of QoS is to guarantee the high performance
of critical applications, which boils down to delivering optimal user experience.
Employees enjoy high performance on their high-bandwidth applications, which enables
them to be more effective and get their job done more quickly.
Function of QOS
 Congestion Management: The bursty feature of data traffic sometimes bounds to increase traffic
more than a connection speed. QoS allows a router to put packets into different queues. Service
specific queues more often depend on priority than buffer traffic in an individual queue and let the
first packet by the first packet out.
 Queue Management: The queues in a buffer can fill and overflow. A packet would be dropped if a
queue is complete, and the router cannot prevent it from being dropped if it is a high priority packet.
This is referred to as tail drop.
 Link Efficiency: The low-speed links are bottlenecks for lower packets. The serialization delay
caused by the high packets forces the lower packets to wait longer. The serialization delay is the time
created to put a packet on the connection.
 Elimination of overhead bits: It can also increase efficiency by removing too many overhead bits.
 Traffic shaping and policing: Shaping can prevent the overflow problem in buffers by limiting the
full bandwidth potential of the applications packets. Sometimes, many network topologies with a
high bandwidth link connected with a low-bandwidth link in remote sites can overflow low
bandwidth connections. Therefore, shaping is used to provide the traffic flow from the high
bandwidth link closer to the low bandwidth link to avoid the low bandwidth link's overflow. Policing
can discard the traffic that exceeds the configured rate, but it is buffered in the case of shaping.
 Point-to-point traffic management: Managing a network is vital however traffic is
delivered, be it end to end, node to node, or point to point. The latter enables
organizations to deliver customer packets in order from one point to the next over the
internet without suffering any packet loss.
 Packet loss prevention: Packet loss can occur when packets of data are dropped in
transit between networks. This can often be caused by a failure or inefficiency, network
congestion, a faulty router, loose connection, or poor signal. QoS avoids the potential of
packet loss by prioritizing bandwidth of high-performance applications.
 Latency reduction: Latency is the time it takes for a network request to go from the
sender to the receiver and for the receiver to process it. This is typically affected by
routers taking longer to analyze information and storage delays caused by intermediate
switches and bridges. QoS enables organizations to reduce latency, or speed up the
process of a network request, by prioritizing their critical application.
Network Traffic Types
Voice Traffic
 Voice traffic is a real time and sensitive traffic type. The voice packets must be delivered at the same
time or with a very low delay. Because, if the voice packets arrive in different types to the
destination, we can not understand what they are saying. So, delay time is very important for such a
traffic.
Data Traffic
 Data traffic is the other important traffic type. This type of network traffic is insensitive traffic to
packet loss if we compare with voice and video traffic. It uses retransmission mechanism if any
packet loss occurs.
 This type of traffic is used in emails, file transfers, web pages etc. So, guarantee is an important
term for such a network traffic. To provide secure and guaranteed transfer, TCP is used with data
traffic. The retransmission mechanism of TCP gives this guarantee and data traffic is sent with a
minimum loss.
 Again, delay is not too important for this type of traffic. For example, if any delay occurs, you
receive an email a little lately that we can measure it with seconds.
Network Traffic Types
Video Traffic
 Video traffic is one of the most used traffic types in today’s world. With the increase of
the YouTube watching times, online training and similar traffics, video became very
important as a traffic type. Video traffic is a high volume traffic that is not as sensitive as
voice traffic. Because video traffic is not real time generally. It can tolerate packet loss
and delays. And delay on the packets do not cause any misunderstanding. It causes only a
little extra time. Beside any loss can be tolerated because it is a very high volume traffic
and if we loss small amount of this traffic, the video can be still understandable and clear.
 There is also another video type that is used in real time. Videoconferencing traffic can be
an example of this type of traffic. In this type of traffic, delays became more important
because we are in the real time and we do not have too much extra time for a face to face
conference call. A person is talking and waiting other person’s talking. This type of
communication can not be achieved with higher delays.
Voice vs Video vs Data Traffic
Major Parameters Defining QoS
Understanding how QoS network software works is reliant on defining the various types of
traffic that it measures. These are:
 Bandwidth: The speed of a link. QoS can tell a router how to use bandwidth. For example,
assigning a certain amount of bandwidth to different queues for different traffic types.
 Delay: The time it takes for a packet to go from its source to its end destination. This can
often be affected by queuing delay, which occurs during times of congestion and a packet
waits in a queue before being transmitted. QoS enables organizations to avoid this by
creating a priority queue for certain types of traffic.
 Loss: The amount of data lost as a result of packet loss, which typically occurs due to
network congestion. QoS enables organizations to decide which packets to drop in this
event.
 Jitter: The irregular speed of packets on a network as a result of congestion, which can
result in packets arriving late and out of sequence. This can cause distortion or gaps in
audio and video being delivered.
QoS Techniques
There are several techniques that businesses can use to guarantee the high performance of their most
critical applications. These include:
Prioritization of delay-sensitive VoIP traffic via routers and switches:
 Many enterprise networks can become overly congested, which sees routers and switches start
dropping packets as they come in and out faster than they can be processed. As a result, streaming
applications suffer.
 Prioritization enables traffic to be classified and receive different priorities depending on its type and
destination.
 This is particularly useful in a situation of high congestion, as packets with higher priority can be sent
ahead of other traffic.
Resource reservation:
 The Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) is a transport layer protocol that reserves resources
across a network and can be used to deliver specific levels of QoS for application data streams.
 Resource reservation enables businesses to divide network resources by traffic of different types and
origins, define limits, and guarantee bandwidth.
Queuing:
 Queuing is the process of creating policies that provide preferential treatment to certain data
streams over others.
 Queues are high-performance memory buffers in routers and switches, in which packets passing
through are held in dedicated memory areas. When a packet is assigned higher priority, it is
moved to a dedicated queue that pushes data at a faster rate, which reduces the chances of it
being dropped.
 For example, businesses can assign a policy to give voice traffic priority over the majority of
network bandwidth.
 The routing or switching device will then move this traffic’s packets and frames to the front of
the queue and immediately transmit them.
Traffic marking:
 When applications that require priority over other bandwidth on a network have been identified,
the traffic needs to be marked.
 This is possible through processes like Class of Service (CoS), which marks a data stream in the
Layer 2 frame header, and Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP), which marks a data
stream in the Layer 3 packet header.
Queuing Algorithms
 Primary role of router is to route the packets from transmitting link to receiving link
through buffer. Apart from the routing of the packets, router is involved in controlling the
traffic congestion in the network. It is possible through the concept of queuing.
 Queuing algorithms deals with the length of packet queue by discarding or dropping the
packet whenever necessary and determine which packet is going to be sent next.
Some of the commonly used queuing algorithms are listed and explained below.
a) First in first out (FIFO)
b) Priority queue (PQ)
c) Fair queue(FQ)
d) Weight fair queue (WFQ)
First in first out (FIFO):
 Simplest way of queuing is first in first out queuing in which the first packet arrives at router is first
one to be transmitted. Buffer space at router is limited and if this buffer is occupies totally due to
higher packet arrival rate or any of the reason, then the packet dropping occurs which cause the
packet losses, in this algorithms router only transmits incoming packet according to order without
considering size, packet origin or how critical the packet is.
 Hence largest disadvantages of FIFO algorithm is that it is not able to serve high priority packet to
network faster than other and advantages of is it is extremely simple to implementation and no
need of packet recording.
Priority queue (PQ):
 Priority queue assures that during congestion the highest priority data does not get delayed by
lower priority traffic. However, lower priority traffic can experience significant delays. PQ is
designed for environments that focus on mission critical data, excluding or delaying less critical
traffic during periods of congestion. Main disadvantage of PQ is starvation of bandwidth for lower
priority application services.
 There is more than one buffer in contrast to FIFO queue. This queue is arranged according to their
priority.
Fair queue (FQ):
 Fair queuing algorithm can solve the problem of starvation of bandwidth in priority queuing by
round robin algorithm in scheduler. Scheduler allows bandwidth to the queues in round robin fashion
so that busty flows cannot make congestion and cannot affect performance of network. The
disadvantage of this queuing is as follow.
 If packet length is bigger in particular queue than this queue use large bandwidth of total network
and hence require more time to be served.
Weight fair queue (WFQ):
 Weight fair queue can be considered as combination of both PQ and FQ. In Weighted-fair queuing
discipline finish time is assign to all the packets. Then according to link bandwidth, packet length,
and number of queue, packets are classified and placed into queues according to information in ToS
field in IP header. The Weighted-fair queuing discipline weights traffic therefore low bandwidth
traffic gets a high level of priority. A unique feature of this queuing discipline is the real-time
interactive traffic will be moved to the front of queues and fairly the other bandwidth shares among
other flows. queue having larger finish time packets get high weight and lower bandwidth in contrast
to queue having smaller finish time.
QoS Models
Two models have been designed to provide QoS :
Integrated Service Model (IntServ):
 User needs to create flow, kind of virtual circuit ,from source to destination and
inform all routers of requirement.
 The implementation of this model requires the presence of IntServ capable
routers in the network and uses RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol) for end-
to- end resource reservation.
Differentiated Service Model (Diffserv):
 The router routes the packet based in the class of service defined in the packet.
 It defines several classes such as ,constant bit rate class , the variable bit rate class
etc.
Integrated Services vs Differentiated Services
Integrated Services Differentiated Services
Architecture that specifies the elements to Architecture that specifies a simple and
guarantee Quality of Service(QoS) on scalable mechanism for classifying and
network managing network traffic and providing
QoS on modern IP networks

Involve prior reservation of resources Mark the packets with priority and send it
before sending to achieve the required to the network and do not require prior
Quality of Service reservation

Not scalable Scalable

Involve per flow setup Involve long term setup
Involve end to end service Scope Involve domain service Scope