Quality of Service
The Quality of Service (QoS) feature allows the management of the level of service and preference given to the various types and sources of traffic going through the firewall so that the traffic that is important to the services and functions connecting through the firewall gets the treatment required to ensure the level of quality that is required.
QoS uses the following techniques:
Traffic policing | Packets are dropped that do not conform to bandwidth limitations |
Traffic Shaping | Assigning minimum levels of bandwidth to be allocated to specific traffic flows to guarantee levels of servers or assigning maximum levels of bandwidth to be allocated to specific traffic flows so that they do not impede other flows of traffic. |
This helps to ensure that the traffic may consume bandwidth at least at the guaranteed rate by assigning a greater priority queue if the guarantee is not being met. Traffic shaping also ensures that the traffic cannot consume bandwidth greater than the maximum at any given instant in time. Flows that are greater than the maximum rate are subject to traffic policing.