3Com 3824 Implementation Guide - Page 48

48 CHAPTER 6: USING TRAFFIC PRIORITIZATION For detailed descriptions of the Command Line Interface (CLI) commands that you require to manage the Switch please refer to the Management Interface Reference Guide supplied in HTML format on the CD-ROM that accompanies your Switch. What is Traffic Prioritization? Today's application traffic consists of three common types of data: ■ Time critical data such as video and voice. ■ Business critical data such as database transactions and online transactions. ■ Opportunistic data such as web browsing, email and file transfers. When these different types of data compete for the same bandwidth, a network can quickly become overloaded, resulting in slow response times (long latency), and application time-outs. Traffic prioritization is a mechanism that allows you to prioritize data so that time-sensitive and system-critical data can be transferred smoothly and with minimal delay over a network. The benefits of using traffic prioritization are: ■ You can control a wide variety of traffic and manage congestion on your network, therefore improving performance. ■ You can assign priorities to traffic, for example, set higher priorities to time-critical or business-critical applications. ■ You can provide predictable throughput for multimedia applications such as video conferencing or voice over IP platforms like the 3Com NBX, as well as minimizing traffic delay and jitter. ■ You can improve network performance as the amount of traffic grows, which also reduces the need to constantly add bandwidth to the network, therefore saving cost. How Traffic Prioritization Works Traffic prioritization uses the eight traffic queues that are present in your Switch to ensure that high priority traffic is forwarded on a different queue from lower priority traffic. This is what provides Quality of Service (QoS) to your network.