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Quality of Service can either be guarantied or enhanced through prioritization.

So called "best effort" networks treat all transported (relayed / switched) packets the same. It is the best quality a
network node can offer to all packets. (It gives its best to all - what more can you expect!)
However, not all packets are actually of equal priority as seen from a network user perspective. 100g Ethernet with
Voice over IP (VoIP), the demand for better transmission quality for selected packets arises. The "best effort" is still
the same, but the scheduling and storing ressources are no longer equally distributed among the traffic. Some
packets are discriminated in order to pave the way for the time or loss critical ones.

The mentioned 




 differ in implementation cost and achievable

results.
 allows for strict reserved resources and can therefore implement guarantied QoS parameter limits.
However, the resource reservation requires a setup phase, where all involved network nodes receive a reservation
request, check the availability and if possible reserve the resources (queue space, queueing management strategy,
scheduling strategy) accordingly. Such a mechanism is a stateful procedure for the nodes and requires a connection-
oriented session management. That is, there is a setup phase (which involves the reservation), a working phase (the
actual communication session) and a tear down phase (which also includes the release of reserved resources
(bandwidth, waiting queue space, dropping mechanism or whatever). In order to avoid wasted reservations due to
broken sessions, which have not gone through a tear down, a soft-state approach with reservation timeouts and
periodic reservation refreshs are used.
Reservation also requires session admission control. That is, setup requests, which can not provide the requested
resources are to block the request and to turn down the admission to the reserved network.

!
The following picture shows a typical VoIP network with redundant switch connections within the LAN and redundant
WAN interconnection. All the yellow boxes are VoIP phones, which are PoE connected to their respective switch (blue
boxes).

Improved QoS for Voice calls/sessions is generally achieved by priority marking within the QoS bits of the Ethernet
frame. Ethernet (802.3) however, did not include such bit information. The tag extention for Virtual LANs (VLANs) is
required to place the priority marking in the extended frame. VLAN tags are standardized in 802.1Q. They are a 4
Byte field that is inserted between the source address and the type/length field of the original ethernet frame format.
Those four bytes are split into two 2 byte fields, the "Tag Protocol Identifier (TPI)" and the "VLAN Tag Control
Information (VLAN TCI)" byte. The TPI field corresponds to the original type field where switches realize the extended
frame version by the common TPI value of 8100 hex. From the QoS perspective, the VLAN TCI is much more
important. It contains two main sections - the User Priority (UP) and the VLAN identifier (VID). There is no obligation
to use both sections all the time. Depending on the actual usage of the fields, those frames are called


? VLAN-tagged frame: VLAN identification and Priority information

? Priority-tagged frame: Priority information and no VLAN identification information
As seen in the figure below, the "User Priority" field used for QoS marking offers three bits and hence 8 QoS classes.
Such class based quality strategies are often called "class of service (COS)" schemes. Three bits / 8 classes are most
common in priority based QoS systems and most installations use policies with two or three classes out of the eight
available. This is often due to the number of physically available waiting queues within the switches. It does not make
sense to mark up to eight classes when the marked packets are later on sorted into only two waiting queues in the
transit nodes.

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The general answer is - from the application and/or user input. Getting asked all the time whether to dial in as priority
user or as ordinary user is not sensible and certainly not what internet users long for. It is the demand for acceptable
service quality depending on the type of service the user is consuming. Hence the service providing application seems
to be the best source for priority requests. Most applications run on UDP or TCP and use IP as the underlying layer
three network protocol.
Marking Internet Protocol packets (Layer 3 / L3 marking) for certain quality requirements is as old as the IP standard.
The original definition is often referred to as "TOS quality" and consists of two parts for type of service marking. As
shown in the following picture this is 3 precedence bits (defined in RFC 1122) and the "DTRM" bits, which stands for
"minimize delay, maximize throughput, maximize reliability, minimize monetary cost" (defined in RFC 1349).
The first three bits simply signal which packet is more important than its neighbouring packet. The DTRM bits give
hints to the router about the required forwarding parameters (queue length, placing position, dropping strategy and
scheduling strategy).
However, the TOS type of QoS marking is hardly used and the concept of "Differentiated Services (DiffServ)"
redefines this IP header field. The new usage of those header bits is called "Differentiated Service Code Point - DSCP"
and defines 6 bits for priority selection and two unused bits of the header byte. Six bits allow for 64 classes to be
distinguished. There are only a few recommendation on how to select the number of supported classes, their encoding
and resulting forwarding behaviour (Per Hop Behaviour - PHB) in the DiffServ enabled router devices. However, the
following three DSCP groups are defined and commonly used: "Default PHB", "Class Selector PHB", "Expedited
Forwarding PHB" and "Assured Forwarding PHB". "Default PHB" is used for generall internet traffic as it is right now.
"Class Selector PHB" is there to support the original precedence enconding, "Expedited Forwarding PHB" (RFC 2598) is
the single encoding for highly prioritized traffic with strictly limited ressources (e.g. 10% of traffic), which is the basis
for services like pseudo wire emulation. "Assured Forwarding PHB" (RFC 2597) is the classification that marks relative
priority within four classes and three drop precedences within each AF class.
Using the IP precedence bits for Layer 2 / L2 marking is just one way of mapping L3 priority encoding into L2
encoding (such as Ethernet 802.1p or Token Ring 802.5 priotity). The more generic way would be to use a "$

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 . However, such
encoding and mapping policies are in the provider descretion and should be expected to change on multi-hop paths!
Encoding translation functions are likely to be used on domain boundaries. Such encoding tables should be integral
part of Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

As a last point I want to mention the use of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) in todays transport networks. Carrier
grade networks are rapidly reconstructed to support MPLS in order to enable the traffic engineering and fault recovery
mechanisms necessary for large networks. The so called "shim layer" version of MPLS inserts a 32 bit header structure
often referred to as "Layer 2.5" header. It consists of a 20 bit label (an address with local scope), three "Expermiental
- EXP" bits as well as a MPLS-TTL field. Those experimental bits are often used to distinguish eight classes of traffic
with such an MPLS tunnel (MPLS label switched path - LSP). Such MPLS forwarding nodes ignore any payload (e.g.
DSCP) QoS encodings. This suggests to copy the IP precendce bits into the EXP bit field and later on to copy those
three bits into the VLAN user priority field. Once again, this mapping is not strictly defined and could well be
implemented using another mapping table between IP QoS -> MPLS EXP -> Ethernet QoS.