Network Technologies ASI-IP-GTW User Manual

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ASI-IP-GTW User's Manual 
 
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12  Appendix F: Quality of service – Setting 
Packet priority 
Normal IP routing is by best effort. This does not work well for 
broadcast television as the video and audio components needs to be 
transport as a continuous flow of packets without inference caused by 
other traffic over the internet. There are different techniques to secure a 
high quality of service. The main ones are: 
MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) 
Layer 3 routing priority 
Layer 2 routing priority 
12.1 MPLS 
In networks running MPLS, the packets are forwarded along a 
predefined path from an ingress router to an egress router. Packet 
switching is then done according to the label and packets will be 
switched expediently.  The MPLS label is added to the IP packet by the 
ingress router and removed on the egress router. The labelling is done 
on the basis of packet classification. 
12.2 Layer 3 Routing  
An alternative technique to get QoS is to use layer 3 routing and give 
video content packets higher priority than other data. IP packets are 
put into queues according to their priority. Packets with high priority 
are forwarded expediently and have a lower probability to being 
discarded due to buffer overflow. 
 
There are two ways prioritize IP packets called Differentiated services 
(Diff-serve) 
or by the precedence bits (TOS). Both these method use 
the same bits in the IP header and both of them are in common use.  
 
IP precedence values range from 0 to 7. 
DSCP values range from 0 to 63. 
 
 
Figure 43 Differentiated services (Diff-serve) or by the precedence bits (TOS ) 
Layer 3 prioritisation may also be combined with MPLS where layer 3 
routing is used in the aggregation network and MPLS in the core 
network. The DSCP priority setting may be used for MPLS tagging.