Owner's Manual

Chapter 15. QoS | 357
15
15. QoS
This chapter includes the following sections:
• Overview on page 357
• Configuring QoS on page 371
• Displaying QoS Configuration and Performance on page 385
Overview
Quality of Service (QoS) is a feature that allows you to configure a switch to provide different
levels of service to different groups of traffic. For example, QoS allows you to do the following:
• Give some traffic groups higher priority access to network resources
• Reserve bandwidth for special traffic groups
• Restrict some traffic groups to bandwidth or data rates defined in a Service Level
Agreement (SLA)
• Count frames and packets that exceed specified limits and optionally discard them (rate
limiting)
• Queue or buffer frames and packets that exceed specified limits and forward them later
(rate shaping)
• Modify QoS related fields in forwarded frames and packets (remarking)
Figure 21 shows the QoS components that provide these features on NETGEAR switches.