
Differentiated Services: A Standards Approach 25
RFC 2597, “Assured Forwarding PHB Group”
In part, the Abstract of RFC 2597 states the following:
The AF PHB group provides delivery of IP packets in four independently forwarded AF classes. Within
each AF class, an IP packet can be assigned one of three different levels of drop precedence.
Until now, this text has only discussed single PHBs, so new terminology needs to be
clarified before discussing AF in detail. The original RFC (2597) calls AF, as a whole, a
PHB group. RFC 3260 later clarifies this definition and states that AF is actually a type of
PHB group, which actually contains four separate ...