Patent ID: 7346677

Claim:
A method of selectively establishing a quality of service value for a particular network device in a network that comprises a plurality of other heterogeneous network devices, comprising the steps of: receiving application information that defines one or more traffic flows associated with one or more message types generated by an application program, including information identifying one or more points at which the application generates the traffic flows; receiving device information that defines one or more quality of service treatments that the particular network device may apply to data processed by the particular network device; based on the device information and the application information, determining one or more processing policies that associate the traffic flows with the quality of service treatments; creating and storing one or more mappings of the application points to the quality of service treatments that may be used with the processing policies to generate the quality of service value when the application program generates traffic flows of one of the message types; causing generation of the quality of service value, wherein the generation of the quality of service value is based on said one or more mappings and is performed before transmitting said traffic flows of one of the message types to said network; enforcing one of the processing policies at the particular network device in response to receiving traffic from the application program that matches one of the traffic flows of the one of the messages types; and wherein enforcing one of the processing policies comprises: requesting, using an application QoS policy element that is coupled to the application program, an operating system function to modify a packet of the traffic flows using a policy element that requests a different operating system function according to an operating system then in use; and at the particular network device, in response to receiving traffic from the application program that matches the one of the traffic flows of the one of the message types and in response to the operating system function, modifying a portion of the packet to activate a quality of service treatment of the particular network device.