Case Study of Quality of Service (QoS)

Home Users:
For example, there are four young men sharing a three-floor house with one single broadband connection. Tom, a college freshman, is playing the online game with his group members, while Mary, a sophomore student, is talking to her net pal via Skype. In the mean time, Jacky is downloading a movie file by using the P2P application program. Sophia, however, is just trying to log on to the website to send her photos to her family. As a result, the net speed turns out to be a crawl and affects everyone sharing the Internet connection. Billion’s routers with the Quality of Service (QoS) are thus designed for managing traffic flow and bandwidth to solve this problem. You can first classify different applications (On-line game, FTP download/upload, Skype, E-mail) as shown in the Table 1. Then, you can manage and prioritize the flow of bandwidth at different levels e.g. 30% for game, 20% for download, 10% for email, FTP application for 20%, and 35% for others. The QoS can be functioned to identify different applications by priority to enable smooth and responsive broadband connection.

* Table 1: QoS Example of Data Ratio and Priority setting for Home Users

QoS application Data Ratio (%) Priority On-line game 30% High Skype 5% High Email 10% High FTP Upload/Download 20% Upload (High), Download (Normal) Others 35%

Office Users:
The CEO is holding a videoconference with international clients to negotiate for a new million-dollar contract in the meeting room. However, the frame and voice lag happens frequently. On the other hand, the sales are talking to international agencies via VoIP phone, while sending orders via email to vendors for production. Yet, some staff are downloading the MP3 music files, large-size photos and watching the video streaming online. Consequently, the Internet connection has been slowed to a crawl. This is why business users need the QoS feature to manage the traffic of data. Firstly, users need to define and classify important packets; specify minimum guaranteed rate for each application and important packet with priority to ensure good quality of broadband connection (see Table 2).

QoS application Data Ratio (%) Priority Videoconference 30% High VoIP 20% High Email 10% High FTP upload /download 10% Upload (High), Download (Normal) Others 30% MP3 (Low), MSN (Normal)