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Qos and Models

QoS allows network administrators to control how data is dropped during congestion. It should be enabled alongside increasing bandwidth as part of capacity planning. QoS works with traffic engineering to select optimal paths for different types of traffic. There are three main QoS models - Best Effort which provides no guarantees, Integrated Services which reserves resources for each flow but does not scale well, and Differentiated Services which classifies traffic into categories and provides statistical guarantees in a highly scalable way.

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Joseph Attard
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19 views

Qos and Models

QoS allows network administrators to control how data is dropped during congestion. It should be enabled alongside increasing bandwidth as part of capacity planning. QoS works with traffic engineering to select optimal paths for different types of traffic. There are three main QoS models - Best Effort which provides no guarantees, Integrated Services which reserves resources for each flow but does not scale well, and Differentiated Services which classifies traffic into categories and provides statistical guarantees in a highly scalable way.

Uploaded by

Joseph Attard
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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INTRO TO QoS

QoS lets network administrators control when and how data is dropped when congestion does
occur. As such, QoS is an important tool that should be enabled, along with adding bandwidth, as
part of a coordinated capacity-planning process. Another important aspect to consider alongside
QoS is traffic engineering (TE). TE is the process of selecting the paths that traffic will transit through
the network. TE can be used to accomplish a number of goals. For example, a customer or service
provider could traffic engineer its network to ensure that none of the links or routers in the network
are overutilized or underutilized. Alternatively, a service provider or customer could use TE to
control the path taken by voice packets to ensure appropriate levels of delay, jitter, and packet loss.

Providing sufficient Quality of Service (QoS) across IP networks is becoming an increasingly


important aspect of today's enterprise IT infrastructure. Not only is QoS necessary for voice and
video streaming over the network, it's also an important factor in supporting the growing Internet of
Things (IoT). Some applications running on your network are sensitive to delay. These applications
commonly use the UDP protocol as opposed to the TCP protocol. The key difference between TCP
and UDP as it relates to time sensitivity is that TCP will retransmit packets that are lost in transit
while UDP does not. For a file transfer from one PC to the next, TCP should be used because if any
packets are lost, malformed or arrive out of order, the TCP protocol can retransmit and reorder the
packets to recreate the file on the destination PC.

How does QoS work

QoS helps manage packet loss, delay and jitter on your network infrastructure. Since we're working
with a finite amount of bandwidth, our first order of business is to identify what applications would
benefit from managing these three things. Once network and application administrators identify the
applications that need to have priority over bandwidth on a network, the next step is to identify that
traffic. There are several ways to identify or mark the traffic. Class of Service (CoS) and
Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) are two examples. CoS will mark a data stream in the
layer 2 frame header while DSCP will mark a data stream in the layer 3 packet header. Various
applications can be marked differently, which allows the network equipment to be able to categorize
data into different groups.

There are three main models for providing QoS services in a network:

 Best Effort.
 Integrated Services (IntServ).
 Differentiated Services (DiffServ).

The three models are differentiated by how each one enables applications to send data and the way
the network handles data delivery within a specified level of service.

 Best Effort

The Best Effort (BE) QoS model is the simplest of the three. It is the default QoS model used for
Internet and it doesn’t implement any QoS mechanism at all, that is the reason why there isn’t any
complexity associated to this QoS model. BE does not allow for resource reservation or any other
mechanism related to asking for some kind of special treatment to the network. For this reason, BE
model does not work very well will any emerging application with real-time (RT) traffic demands.
This model should not be used when the network resources are not enough to fulfill the QoS
application requirements in terms of the main indicators as bandwidth, delay, jitter, etc. In these
cases, with applications competing for resources, the quality of the end-user experience could be
very poor if there is no other mechanism in place to manage the unfairness.

 Integrated Services

The Integrated Services (IntServ) model is also known as hard QoS model. It’s a model based on
flows, i.e., source and destination IP addresses and ports. With the IntServ model, applications ask
to the network for an explicit resource reservation per flow. Network devices keep track of all the
flows traversing the nodes checking if new packets belong to an existing flow and if there are enough
network resources available to accept the packet.

By reserving resources on the network for each flow, applications obtain resources guarantees and
a predictable behaviour of the network. IntServ model performs deterministic Admission Control
(AC) based on resources requests vs. available resources. The implementation of this model requires
the presence of IntServ capable routers in the network and uses RSVP for end-to-end resource
reservation. RSVP enables a host to establish a connection over connectionless IP Internet:

1. Applications request some level of service to the network before sending data.

2. The network admits or rejects the reservation (per flow) based on available resources.

3. Once cleared, the network expects the application to remain within the requested traffic
profile.

The scalability of this model is limited by the fact that exists a high resource consumption on
network nodes caused by per flow processing and associated state. Remember that network nodes
need to maintain the reservation state for each flow traversing the node. The fact that RSVP is a soft
state protocol with continuous signaling load only aggravates the scalability problem.

IntServ advantages

 Good solution for managing flows in small networks.


 Intserv enables hosts to request per-flow, quantifiable resources, along end-to-end data
paths and to obtain feedback regarding admissibility of these requests.

IntServ disadvantages

 Poor scalability.
 High resource consumption on the network nodes.
 Per flow processing (CPU): signaling & processing load
 Per flow state (memory): to keep track of every flow traversing the node.
 Continuous signaling (RSVP is a soft state protocol).
 It’s very difficult to implement.
 Differentiated Services

Differentiated Services(Diffserv) model is also known as a soft QoS model. It’s a model based in
service classes and per hop behaviours associated to each class. In this case, there is no need for an
explicit request for resource reservation by applications to the network. Differentiated Services is
based on statistical preferences per traffic class. DiffServ allows end devices or hosts to classify
packets into different treatment categories or Traffic Classes (TC), each of which will receive a
different Per-Hop-Behaviour (PHB) at each hop from the source to the destination. Each network
device on the path treats packets according to the locally defined PHB. PHB defines how a node
deals with a TC. Network service policies can be specific to an entire QoS domain, some part of a
network or even a single node. Priorities are marked in each packet using DSCP for traffic
classification. This marking is performed per packet usually at the QoS domain boundary. The
marking can be done at several levels of the networking layers (MPLS EXP, CoS). DiffServ model
implements a statistic, class-based, AC.

DiffServ advantages

 Highly scalable QoS mechanism.


 Does not require any resource reservation mechanism on end hosts.
 Easy configuration, operation and maintenance.
 Support complex traffic classification and conditioning at the edge.
 Can aggregate multiple app flows into a limited number of TCs.
 Reduced overhead associated to the maintenance of policies on a per flow basis.
 Diffserv nodes can process traffic more easily than Intserv devices.
 Diffserv is a distributed QoS service model. Resource allocation is distributed among all the
routers of a Diffserv domain, allowing for a greater flexibility and efficiency in the routing
process.

DiffServ disadvantages

 Coordination between domains in the QoS end-to-end service.


 SPs QoS customization may affect the guaranteed QoS end-to-end service.

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