Linux® Routing

Quality of Service (QoS)

Bandwidth in data networks, although a limited resource, is generally designed and used in a best effort method: Any retransmissions are in the best case taken care of by the application, or in the case of TCP, by the protocol itself. However, the commercialization of the Internet and applications requiring near real-time network support has driven the need for guaranteeing bandwidth better than best effort.

For example, many organizations require that incoming web requests be given priority over most other traffic—a possible customer that is visiting the web site should not have a “slow” connection to the web server due to email that can wait without the application being affected.

Another application requiring better ...