QoS is a set of networking protocols which work like a traffic police who is in charge of ensuring a VIP’s journey for an event. The traffic police makes sure to manage the traffic whilst the high-priority person is allowed to pass through. In the same way, QoS is the use of mechanisms or technologies that work on a network to control traffic and make sure that critical applications can be performed even with limited network capacity. It permits organizations to adjust their overall network traffic by prioritizing specific high-performance applications.
How Does QoS Work?
QoS networking technology works by marking packets to identify service types and then configuring routers to create separate virtual queues for each application, based on their priority. Just like a traffic police has a lookout for which vehicles are of the VIPs and which are the commoners. Of course, many a time VIP vehicles would already be marked!
As a result, bandwidth is reserved for critical applications or websites that have been assigned priority access. Just like a traffic police lets VIP vehicles through!
Benefits of Quality of Services (QoS)
- Unlimited Application Prioritization: QoS helps businesses prevent the delay of sensitive applications, ensuring that they perform to the level that users require.
- Decreased Network Congestion: It helps businesses to prioritize the performance of “inelastic” applications that often have minimum bandwidth requirements, maximum latency limits, and high sensitivity to jitter and latency, such as VoIP and videoconferencing.
- Latency Reduction: Congestion management tools of QoS include priority queuing, first-in, first-out and low-latency queuing.
Quality of Services (QoS) Best Practices
1. Performing a Network Assessment
Performing a network assessment is an important first step in influencing subsequent QoS policy development. A network assessment provides valuable insight into the current state of the network and provides a basis for the type and volume of data processed. In other words, it does network discovery and analysis of the network. This is the easiest way to identify areas of congestion, misconfigurations and other network problems that can hinder the effectiveness of an end-to-end QoS deployment. For example, network assessment can help identify outdated hardware that needs updating.
2. Identify Priority Network Traffic
Once one has performed an assessment of one’s network and documented the results, the next step is to consider which types of network traffic have the highest priority. This includes traffic types that are most important to one’s business, such as protocols that perform dynamic routing activities. Data flows should be classified into specific classes according to their priority.
3. Consider eliminating non-essential dataflow
If one decides that certain dataflow are no longer needed, one should remove them entirely. Eliminating this traffic means that QoS need not be used to drop this traffic when congestion occurs. This allows one to relax bandwidth restrictions without requiring QoS.
4. Implement changes when needed
This emphasizes not only on monitoring changes, but also implementing them when needed. When conducting future network assessments, the information gathered should be used to perform network upgrades and, if necessary, reclassify applications and QoS policies. Think of QoS as fluid, not static.
How Infraon QOS Works
Infraon IMS’s network QoS monitoring module and its powerful bandwidth monitoring module gives one a complete picture of one’s network traffic. It helps one reach/identify the source of bandwidth issues with the help of interactive and informative dashboards/reports.
Conclusion
QoS has become one of the most popular tools for enterprises looking to optimize network performance and improve user experience. It takes care of network performance management along with bandwidth priority management. Today, most organizations use high-bandwidth solutions such as videoconferencing and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) for business communications. Any lag or delay in these services can disrupt business operations and cause delays. However, QoS helps organizations prioritize bandwidth, traffic, and resources to ensure high performance.