How Traffic Prioritization Works 63For a look at a 3Com white paper on how to gain control of the network,please refer to the PDF format article at this link:http://www.3com.com/other/pdfs/products/en_US/getcontrolofthenetwork.pdf(correct at time of publication)How TrafficPrioritization WorksTraffic prioritization uses the four traffic queues that are present in yourSwitch to ensure that high priority traffic is forwarded on a differentqueue from lower priority traffic. This is what provides Quality of Service(QoS) to your network.Traffic prioritization in your Switch may be applied dependent upon twofactors: The level of service requested by an end-station — thetransmitting end-station sets the priority of each stream of traffic.Received traffic at the Switch is forwarded through the appropriatequeue depending on its priority level for onward transmission acrossthe network.or The level of service configured at the Switch for incomingtraffic — the network administrator configures the Switch toprioritize or discard traffic from applications or devices. For example,converged network applications such as voice or video conferencingor business critical software such as Oracle may require a high level ofservice from the network.A QoS network can differentiate between time critical data, businesscritical data and opportunistic data (such as email, File Transfer Protocol(FTP) and Web traffic). A QoS network also has the ability to stopunauthorized usage of the network, such as online gaming.To achieve this level of intelligence, a QoS network incorporates fiveprocesses: Traffic Classification — a QoS network examines the traffic toidentify which application or device generated the traffic. Traffic Marking — after traffic is identified, it is Marked so that othernetwork devices can identify the data and give it the correct level ofservice.
