Introduction to Differentiated Services (DiffServ) and HP-UX IPQoS

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Summary
Differentiated Services (also referred to as DiffServ or DS) provides a network administrator with the
ability to classify network traffic by specific flows and to apply a traffic policy to each of those flows.
Multimedia applications, for example, may need dedicated higher bandwidth to avoid jitter and
delay to ensure seamless communications. Other types of traffic may have bandwidth requirements
as well and would benefit from DiffServ.
HP-UX IPQoS provides a host-based implementation that works within your DiffServ environment for
outbound traffic. HP-UX IPQoS conforms to IETF standards and supports bandwidth allocation, DSCP,
and VLAN marking.
This white paper serves to provide only an introduction to the many features available with DiffServ
and HP-UX IPQoS. Additional references for HP-UX IPQoS and IETF RFC’s are listed at the end of this
document.