This white paper discusses the benefits of QoS in general and examines available QoS mechanisms and how they interoperate. Recent years have witnessed rapid growth rates in computer network traffic.
Network administrators scramble to keep pace with increasing demands by continually adding capacity.
Still, network customers are often dissatisfied with the performance of the network. The growth in popularity of a new breed of resource hungry multimedia applications promises to exacerbate this condition. QoS mechanisms provide a set of tools that can be used by the network administrator to manage the use of network resources in a controlled and efficient manner. These will have the effect of offering improved service to mission critical applications and users, while simultaneously stemming the rate at which capacity must be increased. In other words, QoS can help improve service to the network users while reducing the costs of providing these services.