What Is Quality of Service?

Quality of Service is a mechanism used to ensure that the traffic you prioritize does in fact get top priority
and gets bandwidth attributed to it over anything else that may be trying to use it all. While it can be
used within your network, youll mainly use it to control the traffic between you and the rest of the
Internet.

Think of your network as a busy highway between your devices and the Internet. Quality of Service
would be similar to dividing that highway into transit, carpool, and emergency service lanes only
certain types of traffic are allowed in certain lanes, and some lanes will get to where theyre going with
fewer delays.

Of course, the highway still has a maximum number of lanes in each direction, and making one
of them a carpool lane wont increase the amount of total traffic the highway can handle. It just
makes it easier for some of the traffic to move more smoothly.

Likewise, Quality of Service wont make your Internet connection faster and it wont expand
your total bandwidth throughput itll just make it feel faster for certain applications and
services when the network is congested.

Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conference services, like Skype or Facetime, are services that
are sensitive to both latency and bandwidth and that means they can be improved a great deal
with proper QoS settings.

Understanding Latency & Bandwidth

Latency is a measurement of the delay in communication between you and the person youre
talking with over a network. You may have had phone calls where youve noticed a definite
delay between you saying something and the other person hearing it. That would be an example
of high latency.

Bandwidth, on the other hand, is the rate at which you can download or upload data, usually
limited by the speed of your Internet connection. Between latency and bandwidth,
applications will generally be more sensitive to one or the other.

Gaming is extremely latency-sensitive but generally not bandwidth-sensitive. If youve ever tried
playing a game with high latency (e.g. lag), such as trying to play on a server in another continent,
things take a long time to react or may jump all over the place while the game tries to catch up and
compensate.
Video streaming is very bandwidth-sensitive but not latency-sensitive. Each video has a
bitrate, which is the amount of data that it transfers per period of time, typically measured in
bits per second. The higher the resolution, the greater the bitrate. If the bandwidth available is
less than the required bitrate, the video will stop to buffer as it runs out of loaded data.

These are the sorts of services that are given top priority by Quality of Service mechanisms, as
theyre the most frustrating if they dont run smoothly. Lower priority may be given to traffic
like BitTorrent downloads, which usually isnt urgent, while things like Web browsing tends to
fall somewhere in the middle.

How Quality of Service Works

Because services are disrupted by latency and low bandwidth, Quality of Service can increase
performance either by reducing latency or freeing up bandwidth. Each one has its own technique,
but the two often work in tandem to increase overall network performance.

Different kinds of traffic will benefit from different mechanisms, depending on whether that
traffic is latency-sensitive, bandwidth-sensitive, or both.

Queuing (Latency)
Queuing is the main mechanism used to reduce latency for high priority traffic. A queue allows
the router to keep traffic buffered when it is not yet ready to be processed.

Quality of Service rules may allow packets (chunks of network data) from high-priority services
or applications to jump the queue and be processed first, which helps reduce latency for those
important services and applications.

Rate Limiting (Bandwidth)

If too many packets try to enter the queue at once, the buffer will overflow and packets can be
lost. Rate limiting (also known as packet shaping) restricts the number of packets that the queue
will accept from a particular source, automatically dropping any extras that the source tries to
send it.

This forces the source to reduce the number of packets that it attempts to send, effectively
limiting the bandwidth afforded to that source. Low priority traffic sources may be specifically
limited, whereas a high priority service may cause all other traffic to be rate limited (i.e.
throttled) to free up bandwidth.

Setting Up Quality of Service

The vast majority of Quality of Service mechanisms are handled via your router. Because its the
thing that connects your devices to the Internet, its the perfect spot to look at incoming data and sort that
data to the different devices on the network.

If youre using Wi-Fi, theres a good chance youre already using QoS. Many devices
and routerssupport a protocol called Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) that automatically sorts data into
four categories: Voice, Video, Best Effort, and Background in descending order of priority.

Most routers have some form of Quality of Service capability built in, but some are more
sophisticated than others. Youll usually find it somewhere in the Advanced section of your
routers control panel.

Types of Data Priorities

There are two main ways to assign Quality of Service priorities: a per-device basis and a per-
application basis.

Priority by Device
You may decide that a particular device should be given priority over all others, such as a
gaming console. Every device has a few things that make it uniquely identifiable on a network:
an IP address, a MAC address, and a hostname.

Because a devices MAC address is most likely to be unique and cant be changed, this is
generally the best way to identify a device. But if necessary, any of these can be used.

Prioritizing by device usually involves finding the devices MAC address (which youll usually
find in the devices network settings) and entering it to the Quality of Service settings page.
Because the router now knows the MAC address and its relevant IP address, it recognizes any
traffic which is heading to or from that IP address and is able to give it priority accordingly.
Priority by Application
This is the more common type: priority is assigned based on which port or application a piece of
data is meant to go to. Instead of prioritizing an entire devices traffic, it only prioritizes a certain
type of data.

For example, if you know that all of your BitTorrent traffic goes through port 54321, you may
set a rule that port 54321 has low priority and should only be given bandwidth after all other
applications have gotten the bandwidth they need.

Conversely, you may set a rule saying that Skype on port 33333 should be given highest priority
so its traffic is not only processed first (in order to reduce latency) but is also given as much
bandwidth as it needs (in order to reduce video choppiness).

Try Quality of Service Yourself

Quality of Service helps latency-sensitive traffic (like gaming) and bandwidth-sensitive traffic
(like Netflix) bypass network congestion and allows everything to perform more smoothly even
with a super busy network.

You can either configure it on an app-by-app basis or give top priority to a specific device.
Your router probably has some form of Quality of Service capability built in, so why not give it
a go?

Do you have Quality of Service set up on your home network? What gets highest priority?
What would you relegate to low priority? Leave a comment below!

Every network device has two types of addresses, one called the logical
address -- in most cases this is the IP address -- and the other one being the
physical address -- also known as the MAC address.

So, to sum all that up, you should remember that a IP address is a logical
address which is configured via the operating system, while the MAC address
is a hardware address, burnt into the network card's ROM during the
manufacturing process.

Every NIC has a hardware address that's known as a MAC, for Media Access Control.
Where IP addresses are associated with TCP/IP (networking software), MAC addresses are
linked to the hardware of network adapters.

A MAC address is given to a network adapter when it is manufactured. It is hardwired or

hard-coded onto your computer's network interface card (NIC) and is unique to it.
Something called the ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) translates an IP address into a
MAC address. The ARP is like a passport that takes data from an IP address through an
actual piece of computer hardware.

Once again, that's hardware and software working together, IP addresses and MAC
addresses working together.

For this reason, the MAC address is sometimes referred to as a networking hardware
address, the burned-in address (BIA), or the physical address. Here's an example of a MAC
address for an Ethernet NIC: 00:0a:95:9d:68:16.