QOS-Enabled Networks, 2nd Edition

Preface

Five years have elapsed between the original publishing of this book and this second edition, and it is unquestionably interesting to analyze what has changed. The original baseline was that Quality of Service, or QOS, was in the spotlight. Five years have elapsed and QOS prominence has just kept on growing. It has entered in new realms like the Data Center and also spread into new devices. It is no longer just switches and routers—now even servers have at their disposal a complete QOS toolkit to deal, for example, with supporting multiple virtual machines.

This book’s focus remains in the roots and foundations of the QOS realm. Knowledge of the foundations of QOS is the key to understanding what benefits it offers and what can be built on top of it. This knowledge will help the reader engage in both the conceptual and actual tasks of designing or implementing QOS systems, thinking in terms of the concepts, rather than thinking of QOS simply as a series of commands that should be pasted into the configuration of the devices. It will also help the reader to troubleshoot a QOS network, to decide whether the undesired results being seen are a result of misconfigured tools that require some fine-tuning or the wrong tools. As Galileo Galilei once said, “Doubt is the father of all invention.”

A particular attention is also dedicated to special traffic types and networks, and three case studies are provided where the authors share their experience in terms of practical ...