ZyXEL Communications p-2612HNU-FX User Manual

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Chapter 17 Quality of Service (QoS)
P-2612HNU-Fx User’s Guide
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17.6.1  IEEE 802.1Q Tag
The IEEE 802.1Q standard defines an explicit VLAN tag in the MAC header to 
identify the VLAN membership of a frame across bridges. A VLAN tag includes the 
12-bit VLAN ID and 3-bit user priority. The VLAN ID associates a frame with a 
specific VLAN and provides the information that devices need to process the frame 
across the network. 
IEEE 802.1p specifies the user priority field and defines up to eight separate traffic 
types. The following table describes the traffic types defined in the IEEE 802.1d 
standard (which incorporates the 802.1p). 
17.6.2  IP Precedence
Similar to IEEE 802.1p prioritization at layer-2, you can use IP precedence to 
prioritize packets in a layer-3 network. IP precedence uses three bits of the eight-
bit ToS (Type of Service) field in the IP header. There are eight classes of services 
(ranging from zero to seven) in IP precedence. Zero is the lowest priority level and 
seven is the highest. 
17.6.3  DiffServ 
QoS is used to prioritize source-to-destination traffic flows. All packets in the flow 
are given the same priority. You can use CoS (class of service) to give different 
priorities to different packet types.
Table 67   IEEE 802.1p Priority Level and Traffic Type
PRIORITY 
LEVEL
TRAFFIC TYPE
Level 7
Typically used for network control traffic such as router configuration 
messages.
Level 6
Typically used for voice traffic that is especially sensitive to jitter (jitter is the 
variations in delay).
Level 5
Typically used for video that consumes high bandwidth and is sensitive to 
jitter.
Level 4
Typically used for controlled load, latency-sensitive traffic such as SNA 
(Systems Network Architecture) transactions.
Level 3
Typically used for “excellent effort” or better than best effort and would 
include important business traffic that can tolerate some delay.
Level 2
This is for “spare bandwidth”. 
Level 1
This is typically used for non-critical “background” traffic such as bulk 
transfers that are allowed but that should not affect other applications and 
users. 
Level 0
Typically used for best-effort traffic.