Introducing the Quality-of-Service Policy

You implement quality of service by defining a quality-of-service (QoS) policy. The QoS policy defines various network attributes, such as customers' or applications' priorities, and actions for handling different categories of traffic. You implement your organization's QoS policy in an IPQoS configuration file. This file configures the IPQoS modules that reside in the Solaris OS kernel. A host with an applied IPQoS policy is considered an IPQoS-enabled system.

Your QoS policy typically defines the following:

• Discrete groups of network traffic that are called classes of service.

• Metrics for regulating the amount of network traffic for each class. These metrics govern the traffic-measuring process that is called metering.

• An action that an IPQoS system and a Diffserv router must apply to a packet flow. This type of action is called a per-hop behavior (PHB).

• Any statistics gathering that your organization requires for a class of service. An example is traffic that is generated by a customer or particular application.

When packets pass to your network, the IPQoS-enabled system evaluates the packet headers. The action that the IPQoS system takes is determined by your QoS policy.

Tasks for designing the QoS policy are described in Planning the Quality-of-Service Policy.