Design Reference

Table Of Contents
Chapter 14: QoS design guidelines
This section provides design guidelines to provide Quality of Service (QoS) to user traffic on the
network.
For more information about fundamental QoS mechanisms, and how to configure QoS, see Avaya Virtual
Services Platform 4000 Configuration — QoS and IP Filtering, NN46251-502.
QoS mechanisms
Virtual Services Platform 4000 has a solid, well-defined architecture to handle QoS in an
efficient and effective manner. The following sections briefly describe several QoS
mechanisms that the platform uses.
QoS classification and mapping
Virtual Services Platform 4000 provides a hardware-based QoS platform through hardware
packet classification. Packet classification is based on the examination of the QoS fields within
the Ethernet packet, primarily the DiffServ Codepoint (DSCP) and the 802.1p fields.
You can configure ingress interfaces in one of two ways. In the first type of configuration, the
interface does not classify traffic, but it forwards the traffic based on the packet markings. This
mode of operation applies to trusted interfaces (core port mode) because the DSCP or 802.1p
field is trusted to be correct, and the edge switch performs the mapping without
classification.
In the second type of configuration, the interface classifies traffic as it enters the port, and
marks the packet for further treatment as it traverses Virtual Services Platform 4000 network.
This mode of operation applies to untrusted interfaces (access port mode) because the DSCP
or 802.1p field is not trusted to be correct.
Virtual Services Platform 4000 assigns an internal QoS level to each packet that enters a
port.
The Avaya QoS strategy simplifies QoS implementation by providing a mapping of various
traffic types and categories to a Class of Service. These service classes are termed Avaya
Service Classes (ASC). The following table provides a summary of the mappings and their
typical traffic types.
Table 13: Traffic categories and ASC mappings
Traffic category
Application example ASC
Network Control Alarms and heartbeats Critical
Routing table updates Network
Network Design Reference for Avaya VSP 4000 February 2014 129