My TN Connection

With the introduction of new technologies such as Voice over IP and digital video, network managers and administrators have a tough time keeping up with ever-increasing bandwidth requirements. These new technologies are brought with historically high expectations for reliability and quality. Today’s networks must be able to treat these services as high priority. These traditionally “best effort” Local Area Network protocols (Ethernet) face a difficult time handling these High Priority requirements. Quality of Service (QoS) is a method to better handling these new challenges; increasing reliability and quality.

Quality of Service (QoS)
Network administrators have two major types of Quality of Service (QoS) techniques available. They can attempt to negotiate, reserve and hard-set capacity for certain types of service (hard QoS), or just prioritize data without reserving any “capacity setting” (soft QoS). This post will provide information on 802.1p which is a signaling technique for prioritizing network traffic at the data-link/MAC sublayer (OSI Reference Model Layer 2). continue »