ZyXEL P-2812HNU-F1 User Guide - Page 187

Chapter 9 Quality of Service (QoS) 9.6 QoS Technical Reference This section provides some technical background information about the topics covered in this chapter. 9.6.1 IEEE 802.1Q Tag The IEEE 802.1Q standard defines an explicit VLAN tag in the MAC header to identify the VLAN membership of a frame across bridges. A VLAN tag includes the 12-bit VLAN ID and 3-bit user priority. The VLAN ID associates a frame with a specific VLAN and provides the information that devices need to process the frame across the network. IEEE 802.1p specifies the user priority field and defines up to eight separate traffic types. The following table describes the traffic types defined in the IEEE 802.1d standard (which incorporates the 802.1p). Table 45 IEEE 802.1p Priority Level and Traffic Type PRIORITY LEVEL TRAFFIC TYPE Level 7 Typically used for network control traffic such as router configuration messages. Level 6 Typically used for voice traffic that is especially sensitive to jitter (jitter is the variations in delay). Level 5 Typically used for video that consumes high bandwidth and is sensitive to jitter. Level 4 Typically used for controlled load, latency-sensitive traffic such as SNA (Systems Network Architecture) transactions. Level 3 Typically used for "excellent effort" or better than best effort and would include important business traffic that can tolerate some delay. Level 2 This is for "spare bandwidth". Level 1 This is typically used for non-critical "background" traffic such as bulk transfers that are allowed but that should not affect other applications and users. Level 0 Typically used for best-effort traffic. 9.6.2 IP Precedence Similar to IEEE 802.1p prioritization at layer-2, you can use IP precedence to prioritize packets in a layer-3 network. IP precedence uses three bits of the eight-bit ToS (Type of Service) field in the IP header. There are eight classes of services (ranging from zero to seven) in IP precedence. Zero is the lowest priority level and seven is the highest. 9.6.3 DiffServ QoS is used to prioritize source-to-destination traffic flows. All packets in the flow are given the same priority. You can use CoS (class of service) to give different priorities to different packet types. DiffServ (Differentiated Services) is a class of service (CoS) model that marks packets so that they receive specific per-hop treatment at DiffServ-compliant network devices along the route based on the application types and traffic flow. Packets are marked with DiffServ Code Points (DSCPs) indicating the level of service desired. This allows the intermediary DiffServ-compliant network devices to handle the packets differently depending on the code points without the need to P-2812HNU(L)-Fx Series User's Guide 187