Cisco IOS™ 12.0 Quality of Service

Chapter 14. Signaling Overview

In the most general sense, QoS signaling is a form of network communication that provides a way for an end station or network node to communicate with, or signal, its neighbors to request special handling of certain traffic. QoS signaling is useful for coordinating the traffic handling techniques provided by other QoS features. It plays a key role in configuring successful overall end-to-end QoS service across your network.

True end-to-end QoS requires that every element in the network path—switch, router, firewall, host, client, and so forth—deliver its part of QoS, and all of these entities must be coordinated with QoS signaling.

Many viable QoS signaling solutions provide QoS at some places in the infrastructure; ...