The DiffServ Architecture

RFC 2475 defines an architecture for Differentiated Services—how to use DiffServ Code Point (DSCP) bits and various QoS mechanisms to provide different qualities of service in your network.

DiffServ has two major components:

  • Traffic conditioning— Includes things such as policing, coloring, and shaping. Is done only at the edge of the network.

  • Per-hop behaviors— Essentially consist of queuing, scheduling, and dropping mechanisms. As the name implies, they are done at every hop in the network.

Cisco IOS Software provides all sorts of different tools to apply these architecture pieces. You can configure most services in two ways—a host of older, disconnected, per-platform methods, and a newer, unified configuration set called ...

Get Traffic Engineering with MPLS now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.