Intel 480T, User Manual

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Quality of Service
(QoS)
This chapter describes the concept of Quality of Service (QoS) and
explains how to configure QoS on the Intel
®
NetStructure
™
480T Routing
Switch.
Overview of Policy-Based Quality of
Service
Policy-based QoS is a feature of the switch architecture that allows you to
specify different service levels for traffic traversing the switch. Policy-
based QoS is an effective control mechanism for networks that have
heterogeneous traffic patterns. Using Policy-based QoS, you can specify
the service level that a particular traffic type receives.
The main benefit of Policy-based QoS is that it allows you to protect
bandwidth for important categories of applications or specifically limit
the bandwidth associated with less critical traffic. For example, if voice
over IP traffic requires a reserved amount of bandwidth to function
properly, using Policy-based QoS, you can reserve sufficient bandwidth
and thus preserve latency characteristics critical to this type of
application. Likewise, other applications may be seen as less critical and
may be bandwidth-limited so as to not consume excessive bandwidth.
The switch contains separate hardware queues on every physical port.
Each hardware queue is programmed with bandwidth management and
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