Here are some more notes from my studies.  Of course, no one cares about them but me, but it’s my blog.  I’m sure someone will find it useful.  Please help to correct dumbass mistakes.

• Congestion

  • Speed mismatch - traffic leaves a lower-bandwidth interface than the one it came in on
  • Aggregation problem - lots of links with one egress of equal bandwidth
  • Confluence problem - a bunch of traffic needs to egress out of the same interface

• Queuing

Here’s another set of notes from my ONT studies.  I’m sure someone will find it useful.  Please help to correct dumbass mistakes.

• Classification is done with traffic desriptors

  • Ingress interface
  • CoS value on ISL or 802.1P frames
  • Source/destination IP address
  • IP Precedence or DSCP value
  • MPLS EXP
  • Application type

• Layer 3 QoS

  • Type of Service (ToS) is 8-bit field.
  • First 3 bits of ToS are the IP precedence.
  • First 6 bits of ToS are the DSCP value.
  • Last 2 bits of ToS are explicit congestion notification (ECN).

• Layer 2 QoS

I’ll try to keep it a little shorter this time.

Major issues for converged enterprise networks

• Available bandwidth: competition among applications
  • Fixes
    • Increase bandwidth: More power!
    • Properly queue based on classification and marking: QoS
    • Compress: cRTP, TCP header compression, etc.
• Delay: Lead time to get a packet to the destination
  • Types of delay
    • Processing delay: routing, switch delay
    • Queuing delay: how long a frame stays in an output queue
    • Serialization delay:  how long to put the frame on the wire
    • Propagation delay: the time to cross the physical medium
• Jitter (delay variation): Variation is the delay
  • Different delays mean different arrival times
  • De-jitter buffers save up packets to reduce jitter (like the old CD writers)
  • Fixes
    • More bandwidth
    • Prioritize sensitive data and forward first
    • Remark (reclassify) packets based on sensitivity
    • Enable L2 payload compression: make sure compression delay isn’t worse than the jitter
    • Use header compression
• Packet loss: Packets are lost in the network somewhere
  • Fixes
    • More bandwidth
    • Increase buffers space: more room for the queue on the interface
    • Provide guaranteed bandwidth: Queuing and QoS
    • Congestion avoidance
      • Random Early Detection (RED) and weighted RED (WRED) drop packets before the queue is full
      • Selective dropping is better than FIFO or LIFO dropping

QoS History