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What is QoS in Networking?

Time：2021-07-08 Source：UTEPO

WHAT IS QoS IN NETWORKING?

Quality of service (QoS) is the use of mechanisms or technologies to control traffic and ensure the performance of critical applications. It enables organizations to adjust their overall network traffic by prioritizing specific high-performance applications.

QoS is typically applied to networks that carry traffic for resource-intensive systems. Common services for which it is required including the following.

Using QoS in networking, organizations have the ability to optimize the performance of multiple applications on their network and gain visibility into the bit rate, delay, jitter, and packet rate of their network. This ensures they can engineer the traffic on their network and change the way that packets are routed to the internet or other networks to avoid transmission delay. This also ensures that the organization achieves the expected service quality for applications and delivers expected user experiences.

As per the QoS meaning, the key goal is to enable networks and organizations to prioritize traffic, which includes offering dedicated bandwidth, controlled jitter, and lower latency. The technologies used to ensure this are vital to enhancing the performance of business applications, wide-area networks (WANs), and service provider networks.

HOW DOES QoS WORK?

Let’s suppose you want to take a bus to the train station where you’ll continue your journey by train. So you get on a bus headed for the station. After a short time, the bus hits the traffic jam that was caused by an accident.

Uh-oh, you are going to miss your train if you only had a separate lane on the road that only the bus could use.

In many modern cities, this is a reality. Buses have their own lane and they can keep their time table regardless of the traffic on the roads.

QoS works in exactly this way. QoS networking technology works by marking packets (Bus) to identify service types, then configuring routers to create separate virtual queues (Bus Lane) 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.

Understanding how QoS network software works is reliant on defining the various types of traffic that it measures.