Security Contexts

Quality of Service

This chapter covers the following topics:

In a standard IP network, all packets are processed identically based on best effort. The network devices usually ignore the importance or criticality of the data that is passing through the network. This creates problems in deployments where time-sensitive traffic, such as voice and video packets, is delayed or dropped because the network devices do not prioritize it over other traffic. The feature of prioritizing some traffic over other traffic is known as quality of service (QoS).

QoS is useful in the following network deployments:

Many different types of QoS mechanisms are available in the Cisco devices, such as the following:

Note

QoS is useful in policing and prioritizing packets only when there is congestion in the network. For end-to-end QoS, all network devices along the path should be QoS capable.

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