Traffic - Quality of Service (QoS)

In-order to achieve even more effective WAN acceleration, a network traffic Quality of Service (QOS) can be incorporated in the Traffic Squeezer. A fair share of bandwidth is reserved for each of the service traffic which passes though the WAN links. Also based on the requirements traffic prioritization can be included.


Quality of Service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. For example, a required bit rate, delay, jitter, packet dropping probability and/or bit error rate may be guaranteed. Quality of Service guarantees are important if the network capacity is insufficient, especially for real-time streaming multimedia applications such as voice over IP and IP-TV, since these often require fixed bit rate and are delay sensitive, and in networks where the capacity is a limited resource, for example in cellular data communication. In absence of network congestion, QoS mechanisms are not required.
Courtesy: Wikipedia.

Fig: Pictorial representation of incorporated Sample QoS Policy in Traffic Squeezer

It really makes sense to incorporate QOS in WAN Acceleration solution. Since the WAN connectivity in most cases would be much slower than the corporate LAN speed itself, the routers might fail to deliver (drop) some packets if they arrive when their buffers are already full. The receiving application may ask for this information to be retransmitted, possibly causing severe delays in the overall transmission. It is important to guarantee a minimum specific bandwidth for the most important traffic or mission critical traffic and allocate the rest of the bandwidth for the less critical traffic.

In case of traffic which contains VOIP (or some Video Conference) application packets the data transfers between the ends should be almost real time. Hence it makes sense to always prioritize this sort of real-time packet transfers.










However though Traffic Squeezer intends to support exclusively the QoS feature, the actual mechanism which it incorporates is yet to be decided and it is still work in progress.


Well QoS is certainly required for any kind of Organization setup right from huge corporate deployments to even a SOHO setup. Because what matters is that which sort of traffic needs what kind of treatment. Also with the more dependency on VOIP (or Video Conferencing) applications and also in most of the cases this kind of traffic would be a part of the data traffic, QoS is mandatory in such cases.


Video demonstration of Need for QoS in WAN or Point-to-Point connected networks:

Traffic Squeezer - QOS (Quality of Service)  feature