What is QoS

There are many technologies in network that make your network equipment professional. We try to focus on them and introduce them to you, so in this blog we explain QoS in networking. What does it do? How does QoS improve performance of your network? And some other features. If you want to know about this capability follow this article.

What is QoS:

Quality of Service (QoS) is a network mechanism that used to manage quality and determine priority of data traffic transmission on a network. This protocol ensures that different types of data traffic such as video, voice and other kind of data get appropriate good level of service. The key goal of this capability is activating network and organization to prioritize traffic, contain providing dedicated bandwidth, controlling jitter, and reducing latency.

Network devices don’t really care about the type of traffic they have to forward. Your switch receives an Ethernet frame, looks for the destination MAC address and forwards the frame towards the destination. The same thing applies to your router, it receives an IP packet, looks for the destination in the routing table and it forwards the packet towards the destination.

Usually use QoS for improving the performance of business applications, WAN and service provider network. Typical services that require the use of include the following.

• IPTV
• Online Gaming
• Streaming Media
• Video Conference
• VoD
• VoIP

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. During this process, policing mechanisms may discard some packets. Subsequently, packets are classified again based on their markings.

Congestion management and congestion avoidance mechanisms assign different priorities to various types of packets so that packets with higher priorities can pass through gateways earlier in cases of network congestion.

Finally, the system sends the processed packets through the egress interface using the QoS mechanism.

Read more: What is Cisco Switch

Imagine an office as an example, in addition to the basic web browsing and email services, services such as Telnet-based device login, remote video conferences, real-time voice calls, FTP file upload and download, and video playback must also have their network quality guaranteed during busy hours. If services have varying network quality requirements, you can configure corresponding QoS functions or enable Quality of Service only for some services to meet the requirements.

Types of network traffic:

Because of knowing how Quality of Service (QoS) works, you must know 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. Quality of Service 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.

Advantages of QoS:

QoS is really important for business that needs 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 makes administrators are able to manage the organization’s internet resources better. This also reduces costs and the need for investments in link expansions. In other wise, QoS allows administrators to better manage an organization’s internet resources, effectively reducing costs and investment requirements for link expansion.
• Enhanced user experience: The ultimate goal of QoS is to ensure high performance for critical applications, thus providing the best user experience. Employees can achieve high performance when using high-bandwidth applications, which can enhance productivity and enable them to complete tasks more quickly.
• Point-to-point traffic management: Regardless of how traffic is delivered, network management is crucial. By using point-to-point delivery, organizations can sequentially deliver customer packets from one point to another on the Internet without 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. Latency is typically affected by routers taking longer to analyze information and storage delays caused by intermediate switches and bridges. Quality of Service enables organizations to reduce latency or speed up the process of a network request by prioritizing their critical application.

Read more: What is VLAN Configuration

Why is QoS important:

Traditional business networks operated as separate entities. Phone calls and teleconferences were handled by one network, while laptops, desktops, servers and other devices connected to another. They rarely crossed paths, unless a computer used a telephone line to access the internet.

When networks only carried data, speed was not overly important. But now, interactive applications carrying audio and video content need to be delivered at high speed, without packet loss or variations in delivery speed.

QoS is particularly important to guarantee the high performance of critical applications that require high bandwidth for real-time traffic. For example, 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.

QoS helps businesses prevent the delay of these sensitive applications, ensuring they perform to the level that users require. For example, lost packets could cause a delay to the stream, which results in the sound and video quality of a videoconference call to become choppy and indecipherable.

QoS is increasingly important as network performance requirements adapt to the growing number of people using them. The latest online applications and services require vast amounts of bandwidth and network performance, and users demand they offer high performance at all times. Organizations, therefore, need to deploy techniques and technologies that guarantee the best possible service.

QoS is also becoming increasingly important as the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to come to maturity. For example, in the manufacturing sector, machines now leverage networks to provide real-time status updates on any potential issues. Therefore, any delay in feedback could cause highly costly mistakes in IoT networking. Quality of Service enables the data stream to take priority in the network and ensures that the information flows as quickly as possible.

Cities are now filled with smart sensors that are vital to running large-scale IoT projects such as smart buildings. The data collected and analyzed, such as humidity and temperature data, is often highly time-sensitive and needs to be identified, marked, and queued appropriately.

Read more: what is MAC address

Conclusion:

QoS is a feature or capability of switches that allows businesses to prioritize different applications, data streams, and users, preventing packet loss for critical traffic. Switches with QoS can ensure optimal network performance.

Atech.ae provides cost-effective switches such as cisco switches with QoS support, these are suitable for various scenarios, such as S3150-8T2FP, S3400-24T4FP, S3260-16T4FP, etc. You can select and purchase Atech.ae switches based on your requirements in high-quality and affordable price. In addition, if you buy switch from Atech online shop of network equipment, you will use after-sales service such as atech warranty.