Filter
Top Products
11-1
v1.0, May 2008
Chapter 11
Differentiated Services
Differentiated Services (DiffServ) is one technique for implementing Quality of Service (QoS)
policies. Using DiffServ in your network allows you to directly configure the relevant parameters
on the switches and routers rather than using a resource reservation protocol.This section explains
how to configure the 7000 Series Managed Switch to identify which traffic class a packet belongs
to, and how it should be handled to provide the desired quality of service. As implemented on the
7000 Series Managed Switch, DiffServ allows you to control what traffic is accepted and what
traffic is discarded.
How you configure DiffServ support on a 7000 Series Managed Switch varies depending on the
role of the switch in your network:
• Edge device. An edge device handles ingress traffic, flowing towards the core of the network,
and egress traffic, flowing away from the core. An edge device segregates inbound traffic into
a small set of traffic classes, and is responsible for determining a packet’s classification.
Classification is primarily based on the contents of the Layer 3 and Layer 4 headers, and is
recorded in the Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) added to a packet’s IP header.
• Interior node. A switch in the core of the network is responsible for forwarding packets,
rather than for classifying them. It decodes the DSCP code point in an incoming packet, and
provides buffering and forwarding services using the appropriate queue management
algorithms.
Before configuring DiffServ on a particular 7000 Series Managed Switch, you must determine the
QoS requirements for the network as a whole. The requirements are expressed in terms of rules,
which are used to classify inbound traffic on a particular interface. The switch software does not
support DiffServ in the outbound direction.
Rules are defined in terms of classes, policies and services:
• Class. A class consists of a set of rules that identify which packets belong to the class. Inbound
traffic is separated into traffic classes based on Layer 3 and 4 header data and the VLAN ID,
and marked with a corresponding DSCP value. One type of class is supported: All, which
specifies that every match criterion defined for the class must be true for a match to occur.
• Policy. Defines the QoS attributes for one or more traffic classes. An example of an attribute is
the ability to mark a packet at ingress. The 7000 Series Managed Switch su
pports a Traffic
Conditions Policy
. This type of policy is associated with an inbound traffic class and specifies
the actions to be performed on packets meeting the class rules: