Quality of services

Quality of services:

Quality of service (QoS) is an internetworking issue that has been discussed more than defined. We can informally define quality of service as something a flow seeks to attain.

1. Flow Characteristics

Traditionally, four types of characteristics are attributed to a flow: reliability, delay, Jitter, and bandwidth, as shown in Figure 4.30

a.   Reliability

Reliability is a characteristic that a flow needs. Lack of reliability means losing a packet or acknowledgment, which entails retransmission. However, the sensitivity of application programs to reliability is not the same. For example, it is more important that electronic mail, file transfer, and Internet access have reliable transmissions than telephony or audio conferencing.

b.   Delay

Source-to-destination delay is another flow characteristic. Again applications can tolerate delay in different degrees. In this case, telephony, audio conferencing, video conferencing, and remote log-in need minimum delay, while delay in file transfer or e-mail is less important.

c.   Jitter

Jitter is the variation in delay for packets belonging to the same flow. For example, if four packets depart at times 0, 1, 2, 3 and arrive at 20, 21, 22, 23, all have the same delay, 20 units of time. On the other hand, if the above four packets arrive at 21, 23, 21, and 28, they will have different delays: 21, 22, 19, and 24.

Jitter is defined as the variation in the packet delay. High jitter means the difference between delays is large; low jitter means the variation is small. If the jitter is high, some action is needed in order to use the received data.

d.   Bandwidth

Different applications need different bandwidths. In video conferencing we need to send millions of bits per second to refresh a color screen while the total number of bits in an e-mail may not reach even a million.

2. Flow Classes

Based on the flow characteristics, we can classify flows into groups, with each group having similar levels of characteristics. This categorization is not formal or universal; some protocols such as ATM have defined classes.